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ADDRESSES 



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ADDRESSES 



THE RIGHT REVEREND 

PHILLIPS BROOKS 

Bishop of Massachusetts 



Illustrated 



BOSTON 

JOSEPH KNIGHT COMPANY 

1894 






Berwick & Smith, Boston, U.S.A. 



CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

I. The Beauty of a Life of Service . 9 

II. Thought and Action 34 

III. The Duty of the Christian Busi- 

ness Man 63 

IV. True Liberty 88 

V. The Christ in whom Christians Be- 
lieve no 

VI. Abraham Lincoln 140 



ILLUSTRATIONS. 

PAGK 

Portrait, Phillips Brooks . . . Frontispiece 

Trinity Church, Boston 9 

Abraham Lincoln 140 



THE 
BEAUTY OF A LIFE OF SERVICE. 



I should like to read to you again the words 
of Jesus from the 8th chapter of the Gospel of 
St. John:— 

"Then said Jesus to those Jews which be- 
lieved on Him, if ye continue in My word, then 
are ye My disciples indeed ; and ye shall know 
the truth, and the truth shall make you free. 
They answered him, We be Abraham's seed, 
and were never in bondage to any man ; how 
sayest Thou, ye shall be made free ? Jesus an- 
swered them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, who- 
soever committeth sin is the servant of sin. And 
the servant abideth not in the house forever, but 
the Son abideth ever. If the Son, therefore, 
shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed." 

I want to speak to you to-day about the pur- 
pose and the result of the freedom which Christ 
gives to His disciples and the freedom into which 
man enters when he fulfils his life. The purpose 



10 ADDRESSES. 

and result of freedom is service. It sounds to 
us at first like a contradiction, like a paradox. 
Great truths very often present themselves to us 
in the first place as paradoxes, and it is only when 
we come to combine the two different terms of 
which they are composed and see how it is only 
by their meeting that the truth does reveal itself 
to us, that the truth does become known. It is 
by this same truth that God frees our souls, not 
from service, not from duty, but into service and 
into duty, and he who makes mistakes the pur- 
pose of his freedom mistakes the character of his 
freedom. He who thinks that he is being re- 
leased from the work, and not set free in order 
that he may accomplish that work, mistakes the 
Christ from whom the freedom comes, mistakes 
the condition into which his soul is invited to 
enter. For if I was right in saying what I said 
the other day, that the freedom of a man simply 
consists in the larger opportunity to be and to 
do all that God makes him in His creation capa- 
ble of being and doing, then certainly if man 
has been capable of service it is only by the en- 
trance into service, by the acceptance of that life 
of service for which God has given man the 
capacity, that he enters into the fulness of his 
freedom and becomes the liberated child of God. 
You remember what I said with regard to the 
manifestations of freedom and the figures and 



BEAUTY OF A LIFE OF SERVICE. II 

the illustrations, perhaps some of them which we 
used, of the way in which the bit of iron, taken 
out of its uselessness, its helplessness, and set 
in the midst of the great machine, thereby recog- 
nizes the purpose of its existence, and does the 
work for which it was appointed, for it immedi- 
ately becomes the servant of the machine into 
which it was placed. Every part of its impulse 
flows through all of its substance, and it does the 
thing which it was made to do. When the ice 
has melted upon the plain it is only when it finds 
its way into the river and flows forth freely to do 
the work which the live water has to do that 
it really attains to its freedom. Only then is it 
really liberated from the bondage in which it was 
held while it was fastened in the chains of win- 
ter. The same freed ice waits until it so finds 
its freedom, and when man is set free simply 
into the enjoyment of his own life, simply into 
the realization of his own existence, he has not 
attained the purposes of his freedom, he has 
not come to the purposes of his life. 

It is one of the signs to me of how human 
words are constantly becoming perverted that it 
surprises us when we think of freedom as a con- 
dition in which a man is called upon to do, and 
is enabled to do, the duty that God has laid upon 
him. Duty has become to us such a hard word, 
service has become to us a word so full of the 



1 2 ADDRESSES. 

spirit of bondage, that it surprises us at the first 
moment when we are called upon to realize that 
it is in itself a word of freedom. And yet we 
constantly are lowering the whole thought of our 
being, we are bringing down the greatness and 
richness of that with which we have to deal, until 
we recognize that God does not call us to our 
fullest life simply for ourselves. The spirit of 
selfishness is continually creeping in. I think it 
may almost be said that there has been no self- 
ishness in the history of man like that which has 
exhibited itself in man's religious life, showing 
itself in the way in which man has seized upon 
spiritual privileges and rejoiced in the good things 
that are to come to him in the hereafter, because 
he had made himself the servant of God. The 
whole subject of selfishness, and the way in 
which it loses itself and finds itself again, is a 
very interesting one, and I wish that we had 
time to dwell upon it. It comes into a sort of 
general law which we are recognizing everywhere 
— the way in which a man very often, in his pur- 
suit of the higher form of a condition in which 
he has been living, seems to lose that condition 
for a little while and only to reach it a little far- 
ther on. He seems to be abandoned by that 
power only that he may meet it by and by and 
enter more deeply into its heart and come more 
completely into its service. So it is, I think, 



BEAUTY OF A LIFE OF SERVICE. 1 3 

with the self-devotion, consecration, and self- 
forgetfulness in which men realize their life. 
Very often in the lower stages of man's life he 
forgets himself, with a slightly emphasized indi- 
vidual existence, not thinking very much of the 
purpose of his life, till he easily forgets himself 
among the things that are around him and for- 
gets himself simply because there is so little of 
himself for him to forget ; but do not you know 
perfectly well how very often when a man's life 
becomes intensified and earnest, when he becomes 
completely possessed with some great passion 
and desire, it seems for the time to intensify his 
selfishness ? It does intensify his selfishness. 
He is thinking so much in regard to himself that 
the thought of other persons and their interests 
is shut out of his life. And so very often when 
a man has set before him the great passion of the 
divine life, when he is called by God to live the 
life of God, and to enter into the rewards of 
God, very often there seems to close around his 
life a certain bondage of selfishness, and he who 
gave himself freely to his fellow-men before now 
seems, by the very intensity, eagerness, and 
earnestness with which his mind is set upon the 
prize of the new life which is presented to him — 
it seems as if everything became concentrated 
upon himself, the saving of his soul, the winning 
of his salvation. That seat in heaven seems to 



14 ADDRESSES. 

burn so before his eyes that he cannot be satis- 
fied for a moment with any thought that draws 
him away from it, and he presses forward that 
he may be saved. But by and by, as he enters 
more deeply into that life, the self-forgetfulness 
comes to him again and as a diviner thing. By 
and by, as the man walks up the mountain, he 
seems to pass out of the cloud which hangs 
about the lower slopes of the mountain, until at 
last he stands upon the pinnacle at the top, and 
there is in the perfect light. Is it not exactly 
like the mountain at whose foot there seems to 
be the open sunshine where men see everything, 
and on whose summit there is the sunshine, but 
on whose sides, and half way up, there seems to 
linger a long cloud, in which man has to strug- 
gle until he comes to the full result of his life ? 
So it is with self-consecration, with service. You 
easily do it in some small ways in the lower life. 
Life becomes intensified and earnest with a serious 
purpose, and it seems as if it gathered itself to- 
gether into selfishness. Only then it opens by 
and by into the largest and noblest works of 
men, in which they most manifest the richness 
of their human nature and appropriate the 
strength of God. Those are great and unselfish 
acts. We know it at once if we turn to Him 
who represents the fulness of the nature of our 
humanity. 



BEAUTY OF A LIFE OF SERVICE. 1 5 

When I turn to Jesus and think of Him as the 
manifestation of His own Christianity — and if 
men would only look at the life of Jesus to see 
what Christianity is, and not at the life of the 
poor representatives of Jesus whom they see 
around them, there would be so much more 
clearness, they would be rid of so many difficul- 
ties and doubts. When I look at the life of 
Jesus I see that the purpose of consecration, 
of emancipation, is service of His fellow-men. 
I cannot think for a moment of Jesus as doing 
that which so many religious people think they 
are doing when they serve Christ, when they 
give their lives to Him. I cannot think of Him 
as simply saving His own soul, living His own 
life, and completing His own nature in the sight 
of God. It is a life of service from beginning 
to end. He gives himself to man because He 
is absolutely the Child of God, and He sets up 
service, and nothing but service, to be the ulti- 
mate purpose, the one great desire, on which 
the souls of His followers should be set, as His 
own soul is set, upon it continually. 

What is it that Christ has left to be His sym- 
bol in the world, that we put upon our churches, 
that we wear upon our hearts, that stands forth 
so perpetually as the symbol of Christ's life ? 
Is it a throne from which a ruler utters his de- 
crees ? Is it a mountain top upon which some 



1 6 ADDRESSES. 

rapt seer sits, communing with himself and with 
the voices around him, and gathering great truth 
into his soul and delighting in it? No, not 
the throne and not the mountain top. It is 
the cross. Oh, my brethren, that the cross 
should be the great symbol of our highest 
measure, that that which stands for consecra- 
tion, that that which stands for the divine state- 
ment that a man does not live for himself and 
that a man loses himself when he does live for 
himself — that that should be the symbol of our 
religion and the great sign and token of our 
faith? What sort of Christians are we that go 
about asking for the things of this life first, 
thinking that it shall make us prosperous to be 
Christians, and then a little higher asking for 
the things that pertain to the eternal prosperity, 
when the Great Master, who leaves us the great 
law, in whom our Christian life is spiritually set 
forth, has as His great symbol the cross, the 
cross, the sign of consecration and obedience? 
It is not simply suffering too. Christ does not 
stand primarily for suffering. Suffering is an 
accident. It does not matter whether you and 
I suffer. "Not enjoyment and not sorrow' 1 is 
our life, not sorrow any more than enjoyment, 
but obedience and duty. If duty brings sorrow, 
let it bring sorrow. It did bring sorrow to the 
Christ, because it was impossible for a man to 



BEAUTY OF A LIFE OF SERVICE. iy 

serve the absolute righteousness in this world 
and not to sorrow. If it had brought joy, and 
glory, and triumph, if it had been greeted at its 
entrance and applauded on the way, He would 
have been as truly the consecrated soul that He 
was in the days when, over a road that was 
marked with the blood of His footprints, He 
found His way up at last to the torturing cross. 
It is not suffering; it is obedience. It is not 
pain; it is consecration of life. It is the joy of 
service that makes the life of Christ, and for us 
to serve Him, serving fellow-man and God — as 
he served fellow-man and God — whether it bring 
pain or joy, if we can only get out of our souls 
the thought that it matters not if we are happy 
or sorrowful, if only we are dutiful and faithful, 
and brave and strong, then we should be in the 
atmosphere, we should be in the great company 
of the Christ. 

It surprises me very often when I hear good 
Christian people talk about Christ's entrance into 
this world, Christ's coming to save this world. 
They say it was so marvellous that Jesus should 
be willing to come down from His throne in 
heaven and undertake all the strange sorrow and 
distress that belonged to Him when He came 
to save the world from its sins. Wonderful? 
There was no wonder in it ; no wonder if we 
enter up into the region where Jesus lives and 



1 8 ADDRESSES. 

think of life as He must have thought of life. 
It is the same wonder that people feel about the 
miracles of Jesus. Is it a wonder that when a 
divine life is among men, nature should have 
a response to make to Him, and He should do 
things that you and I, in our little humanity, 
find it impossible to do? No, indeed, there is 
no wonder that God loved the world. There 
is no wonder that Christ, the Son of God, at any 
sacrifice undertook to save the world. The 
wonder would have been if God, sitting in His 
heaven, the wonder would have been if Jesus, 
ready to come here to the earth and seeing how 
it was possible to save man from sin by suffering, 
had not suffered. Do you wonder at the mother, 
when she gives her life without a hesitation or a 
cry, when she gives her life with joy, with thank- 
fulness, for her child, counting it her privilege? 
Do you wonder at the patriot, the hero, when he 
rushes into the battle to do the good deed which 
it is possible for him to do? No ; read your own 
nature deeper and you will understand your 
Christ. It is no wonder that He should have 
died upon the cross : the wonder would have 
been if, with the inestimable privilege of saving 
man, He had shrunk from that cross and turned 
away. It sets before us that it is not the glories 
of suffering, it is not the necessity of suffering, 
it is simply the beauty of obedience and the ful- 



BEAUTY OF A LIFE OF SERVICE. 1 9 

filment of a man's life in doing his duty and ren- 
dering the service which it is possible for him to 
render to his fellow-man. 

I said that a man when he did that left behind 
him all the thought of the life which he was will- 
ing to live within himself, even all the highest 
thought. It is not your business and mine to 
study whether we shall get to heaven, even to 
study whether we shall be good men ; it is our 
business to study how we shall come into the 
midst of the purposes of God and have the un- 
speakable privilege in these few years of doing 
something of His work. And yet so is our life 
all one, so is the kingdom of God which sur- 
rounds us and infolds us one bright and blessed 
unity, that when a man has devoted himself to 
the service of God and his fellow-man, immedi- 
ately he is thrown back upon his own nature, and 
he sees now — it is the right place for him to see 
— that he must be the brave, strong, faithful 
man, because it is impossible for him to do his 
duty and to render his service, except it is ren- 
dered out of a heart that is full of faithfulness, 
that is brave and true. There is one word of 
Jesus that always comes back to me as about the 
noblest thing that human lips nave ever said 
upon our earth, and the most comprehensive 
thing, that seems to sweep into itself all the 
commonplace experience of mankind. Do you 



20 ADDRESSES. 

remember when He was sitting with His disci- 
ples, at the last supper, how He lifted up His 
voice and prayed, and in the midst of His prayer 
there came these wondrous words: "For their 
sakes I sanctify myself, that they also might be 
sanctified " ? The whole of human life is there. 
Shall a man cultivate himself ? No, not prima- 
rily. Shall a man serve the world, strive to in- 
crease the kingdom of God in the world? Yes, 
)ndeed, he shall. How shall he do it? By cul- 
tivating himself, and instantly he is thrown back 
upon his own life. " For their sakes I sanctify 
myself, that they also might be sanctified." I 
am my best, not simply for myself, but for the 
world. My brethren, is there anything in all the 
teachings that man has had from his fellow-man, 
all that has come down to him from the lips of 
God, that is nobler, that is more far-reaching 
than that — to be my best not simply for my own 
sake, but for the sake of the world into which, 
setting my best, I shall make that world more 
complete, I shall do my little part to renew and 
to recreate it in the image of God ? That is the 
law of my existence. And the man that makes 
that the law of his existence neither neglects him- 
self nor his fellow-men, neither becomes the self- 
absorbed student and cultivator of his own life 
upon the one hand, nor does he become, aban- 
doning himself, simply the wasting benefactor of 



BEAUTY OF A LIFE OF SERVICE. 21 

his brethren upon the other. You can help your 
fellow-men : you must help your fellow-men ; but 
the only way you can help them is by being the 
noblest and the best man that it is possible for 
you to be. I watch the workman build upon the 
building which by and by is to soar into the skies, 
to toss its pinnacles up to the heaven, and I see 
him looking up and wondering where those pinna- 
cles are to be, thinking how high they are to be, 
measuring the feet, wondering how they are to 
be built, and all the time he is cramming a rotten 
stone into the building just where he has set to 
work. Let him forget the pinnacles, if he will, 
or hold only the floating image of them in his 
imagination for his inspiration ; but the thing 
that he must do is to put a brave, strong soul, an 
honest and substantial life into the building just 
where he is now at work. 

It seems to me that that comes home to us 
all. Men are questioning now as they never 
have questioned before whether Christianity is 
indeed the true religion which is to be the sal- 
vation of the world. They are feeling how the 
world needs salvation, how it needs regenera- 
tion, how it is wrong and bad all through and 
through, mixed with the good that is in it every- 
where. Everywhere there is the good and the 
bad, and the great question that is on men's 
minds to-day, as I believe it has never been upon 



22 ADDRESSES. 

men's minds before, is this: Is this Christian 
religion, with its high pretensions, this Christian 
life that claims so much for itself, is it compe- 
tent for the task that it has undertaken to do? 
Can it meet all these human problems, and 
relieve all these human miseries, and fulfil all 
these human hopes? It is the old story over 
again, when John the Baptist, puzzled in his 
prison, said to Jesus, " Art thou He that should 
come? or look we for another?" It seems to 
me that the Christian Church is hearing that cry 
in its ears to-day: "Art thou He that should 
come?" Can you do this which the world 
unmistakably needs to be done ? 

Christian men, it is for us to give our bit of 
answer to that question. It is for us, in whom 
the Christian Church is at this moment partially 
embodied, to declare that Christianity, that the 
Christian faith, the Christian manhood, can do 
that for the world which the world needs. You 
say, "What can I do?" You can furnish one 
Christian life. You can furnish a life so faithful 
to every duty, so ready for every service, so 
determined not to commit every sin, that the 
great Christian Church shall be the stronger for 
your living in it, and the problem of the world 
be answered, and a certain great peace come 
into this poor, perplexed phase of our humanity 
as it sees that new revelation of what Christianity 



BEAUTY OF A LIFE OF SERVICE. 23 

is. Yes, Christ can give the world the thing it 
needs in unknown ways and methods that we 
have not yet begun to suspect. Christianity has 
not yet been tried. My friends, no man dares to 
condemn the Christian faith to-day, because the 
Christian faith has not been tried. Not until 
men get rid of the thought that it is a poor 
machine, an expedient for saving them from suf- 
fering and pain, not until they get the grand idea 
of it as the great power of God present in and 
through the lives of men, not until then does 
Christianity enter upon its true trial and become 
ready to show what it can do. Therefore we 
struggle against our sin in order that men may 
be saved around us, and not simply that our own 
souls may be saved. 

Tell me you have a sin that you mean to com- 
mit this evening that is going to make this night 
black. What can keep you from committing 
that sin? Suppose you look into its conse- 
quences. Suppose the wise man tells you what 
will be the physical consequences of that sin. 
You shudder and you shrink, and, perhaps, you 
are partially deterred. Suppose you see the 
glory that might come to you, physical, temporal, 
spiritual, if you do not commit that sin. The 
opposite of it shows itself to you — the blessing 
and the richness in your life. Again there comes 
a great power that shall control your lust and 



24 ADDRESSES. 

wickedness. Suppose there comes to you some- 
thing even deeper than that, no consequence on 
consequence at all, but simply an abhorrence for 
the thing, so that your whole nature shrinks 
from it as the nature of God shrinks from a sin 
that is polluting and filthy and corrupt and evil. 
They are all great powers. Let us thank God 
for them all. He knows that we are weak 
enough to need every power that can possibly 
be brought to bear upon our feeble lives ; but if, 
along with all of them, there could come this 
other power, if along with them there could 
come the certainty that if you refrain from that 
sin to-night you make the sum of sin that is in 
the world, and so the sum of all temptation that 
is in the world, and so the sum of future evil 
that is to spring out of temptation in the world, 
less, shall there not be a nobler impulse rise up 
in your heart, and shall you not say : " I will not 
do it ; I will be honest, I will be sober, I will be 
pure, at least, to-night"? I dare to think that 
there are men here to whom that appeal can 
come, men who, perhaps, will be all dull and 
deaf if one speaks to them about their personal 
salvation ; who, if one dares to picture to them, 
appealing to their better nature, trusting to their 
nobler soul, that there is in them the power to 
save other men from sin, and to help the work 
of God by the control of their own passions and 



BEAUTY OF A LIFE OF SERVICE. 2$ 

the fulfilment of their own duty, will be stirred 
to the higher life. Men — very often we do not 
trust them enough — will answer to the higher 
appeal that seems to be beyond them when the 
poor, lower appeal that comes within the region 
of their selfishness is cast aside, and they will 
have nothing to do with it. 

Oh, this marvellous, this awful power that 
we have over other people's lives ! Oh ! the 
power of the sin that you have done years and 
years ago ! It is awful to think of it. I think 
there is hardly anything more terrible to the 
human thought than this — the picture of a man 
who, having sinned years and years ago in a way 
that involved other souls in his sin, and then, 
having repented of his sin and undertaken 
another life, knows certainly that the power, 
the consequence of that sin is going on outside 
of his reach, beyond even his ken and knowl- 
edge. He cannot touch it. You wronged a soul 
ten years ago. You taught a boy how to tell his 
first mercantile lie ; you degraded the early 
standards of his youth. What has become of 
that boy to-day? You may have repented. He 
has passed out of your sight. He has gone 
years and years ago. Somewhere in this great, 
multitudinous mass of humanity he. is sinning 
and sinning and reduplicating and extending the 
sin that you did. You touched the faith of some 



26 ADDRESSES. 

believing soul years ago with some miserable 
sneer of yours, with some cynical and sceptical 
disparagement of God and of the man who is the 
utterance of God upon the earth. You taught 
the soul that was enthusiastic to be full of scep- 
ticisms and doubts. You wronged a woman 
years ago, and her life has gone out from your 
life, you cannot begin to tell where. You have 
repented of your sin. You have bowed your- 
self, it may be, in dust and ashes. You have 
entered upon a new life. You are pure to-day. 
But where is the sceptical soul ? Where is the 
ruined woman whom you sent forth into the 
world out of the shadow of your sin years ago? 
You cannot touch that life. You cannot reach 
it. You do not know where it is. No steps of 
yours, quickened with all your earnestness, can 
pursue it. No contrition of yours can draw back 
its consequences. Remorse cannot force the 
bullet back again into the gun from which it 
once has gone forth. It makes life awful to the 
man who has ever sinned, who has ever wronged 
and hurt another life because of this sin, because 
no sin ever was done that did not hurt another 
life. I know the mercy of our God, that while 
He has put us into each other's power to a fear- 
ful extent, He never will let any soul absolutely 
go to everlasting ruin for another's sin ; and so 
I dare to see the love of God pursuing that lost 



BEAUTY OF A LIFE OF SERVICE. 2>] 

soul where you cannot pursue it. But that does 
not for one moment lift the shadow from your 
heart, or cease to make you tremble when you 
think of how your sin has outgrown itself and 
is running far, far away where you can never 
follow it. 

Thank God the other thing is true as well. 
Thank God that when a man does a bit of ser- 
vice, however little it may be, of that too he can 
never trace the consequences. Thank God that 
that which in some better moment, in some nobler 
inspiration, you did ten years ago to make your 
brother's faith a little more strong, to let your 
shop boy confirm and not doubt the confidence 
in man which he had brought into his business, 
to establish the purity of a soul instead of stain- 
ing it and shaking it, thank God, in this quick, 
electric atmosphere in which we live, that, too, 
runs forth. Do not say in your terror, " I will 
do nothing. 11 You must do something. Only 
let Christ tell you — let Christ tell you that 
there is nothing that a man rests upon in the 
moment, that he thinks of, as he looks back 
upon it when it has sunk into the past, with any 
satisfaction, except some service to his fellow- 
man, some strengthening and helping of a 
human soul. 

Two men are walking down the street together 
and talking away. See what different conditions 



28 ADDRESSES. 

those two men are in. One of them has his soul 
absolutely full of the desire to help his fellow- 
man. He peers into those faces as he goes, and 
sees the divine possibility that is in them, and 
he sees the divine nature everywhere. They are 
talking about the idlest trifles, about the last bit 
of local Boston politics. But in their souls one 
of those men has consecrated himself, with the 
new morning, to the glorious service of God, and 
the other of them is asking how he may be a 
little richer in his miserable wealth when the 
day sinks. Oh, we look into the other world 
and read the great words and hear it said, Between 
me and thee, this and that, there is a great gulf 
fixed ; and we think of something that is to come 
in the eternal life. Is there any gulf in eter- 
nity, is there any gulf between heaven and hell 
that is wider, and deeper, and blacker, that is 
more impassable than that gulf which lies be- 
tween these two men going upon their daily way? 
Oh, friends, it is not that God is going to judge 
us some day. That is not the awful thing. It 
is that God knows us now. If I stop an instant 
and know that God knows me through all these 
misconceptions and blunders of my brethren, 
that God knows me — that is the awful thing. 
The future judgment shall but tell it. It is here, 
here upon my conscience, now. It is awful to 
think how the commonplace things that men can 



BEAUTY OF A LIFE OF SERVICE. 29 

do, the commonplace thoughts that men can 
think, the commonplace lives that men can live, 
are but in the bosom of the future. The thing 
that impresses me more and more is this — that 
we only need to have extended to the multitude 
that which is at this moment present in the few, 
and the world really would be saved. There is 
but the need of the extension into a multitude of 
souls of that which a few souls have already 
attained in their consecration of themselves to 
human good, and to the service of God, and I 
will not say the millennium would have come, 
I don't know much about the millennium, but 
heaven would have come, the new Jerusalem 
would be here. There are men enough in this 
church this morning, there are men enough sit- 
ting here within the sound of my voice to-day, 
if they were inspired by the spirit of God and 
counted it the great privilege of their life, to do 
the work of God — there are men enough here to 
save this city, and to make this a glowing city 
of our Lord, to relieve its poverty, to lighten its 
darkness, to lift up the cloud that is upon hearts, 
to turn it into a great, I will not say psalm- 
singing city, but God-serving, God-abiding city, 
to touch all the difficult problems of how society 
and government ought to be organized then with 
a power with which they should yield their diffi- 
culty and open gradually. The light to measure 



30 ADDRESSES. 

would be clear enough, if only the spirit is 
there. Give me five hundred men, nay, give 
me one hundred men of the spirit that I know 
to-day in three men that I well understand, and 
I will answer for it that the city shall be saved. 
And you, my friend, are one of the five hundred 

you are one of the one hundred. 

" Oh, but," you say, " is not this slavery over 
again? You have talked about freedom, and 
here I am once more a slave. I had about got 
free from the bondage of my fellow-men, and 
here I am right in the midst of it again. What 
has become of my personality, of my indepen- 
dence, if I am to live thus? " Ay, you have got 
to learn what every noblest man has always 
learned, that no man becomes independent of 
his fellow-men excepting in serving his fellow- 
men. You have got to learn that Christianity 
comes to us not simply as a luxury but as a 
force, and no man who values Christianity sim- 
ply as a luxury which he possesses really gets 
the Christianity which he tries to value. Only 
when Christianity is a force, only when I seek 
independence of men in serving men, do I cease 
to be a slave to their whims. I must dress as 
they think I ought to dress ; I must walk in the 
streets as thev think I ought to walk ; I must do 
business just after their fashion ; I must accept 
their standards ; but when Christ has taken pos- 



BEAUTY OF A LIFE OF SERVICE. 3 1 

session of me and I am a total man, I am more 
or less independent of these men. Shall I care 
about their little whims and oddities? Shall I 
care about how they criticise the outside of my 
life ? Shall I peer into their faces as I meet them 
in the street, to see whether they approve of me 
or not? And yet am I not their servant? There 
is nothing now I will not do to serve them, there 
is nothing now I will not do to save them. If 
the cross comes, I welcome the cross, and look 
upon it with joy, if, by my death upon the cross 
in any way, I may echo the salvation of my Lord 
and save them. Independent of them? Surely. 
And yet their servant? Perfectly. Was ever 
man so independent in Jerusalem as Jesus was? 
What cared He for the sneer of the Pharisee, 
for the learned scorn of the Sadducee, for the 
taunt of the people and the little boys that had 
been taught to jeer at Him as He went down 
the street, and yet the very servant of all their 
life ? He says there are two kinds of men — they 
who sit upon a throne and eat, and they who 
serve. " I am among you as he that serveth." 
Oh, seek independence. Insist upon indepen- 
dence. Insist that you will not be the slave of 
the poor, petty standards of your fellow-men. 
But insist upon it only in the way in which it 
can be insisted upon, by becoming absolutely 
the servant of their needs. So only shall you 



32 



ADDRESSES. 



be independent of their whims. There is one 
great figure, and it has taken in all Christian 
consciousness, that again and again this work 
with Christ has been asserted to be the true ser- 
vice in the army of a great master, of a great 
captain, who goes before us to his victory, that 
it is asserted that in that captain, in the entrance 
into his army, every power is set free. Do you 
remember the words that a good many of us 
read or heard yesterday in our churches, where 
Jesus was doing one of His miracles, and it is 
said that a devil was cast out, the dumb spake ? 
Every power becomes the man's possession, and 
he uses it in his freedom, and he fights with it 
with all his force, just as soon as the devil is cast 

out of him. 

I have tried to tell you the noblest motive in 
which vou should be a pure, an upright a faith- 
ful, and a strong man. It is not for the salva- 
tion of your life, it is not for the salvation of 
yourself: It is not for the satisfaction of your 
tastes. It is that you may take your placed 
the great army of God and go forward having 
something to do with the work that He is doing 
in the world. You remember the days of the 
war, and how ashamed of himself a man felt who 
never touched with his finger the great struggle 
in which the nation was engaged. Oh, to go 
throu-h this life and never touch with my finger 



BEAUTY OF A LIFE OF SERVICE. 33 

the vast work that Christ is doing, and when the 
cry of triumph arises at the end to stand there, 
not having done one little, unknown, unnoticed 
thing to bring about that which is the true life 
of the man and of the world, that is awful. And 
I dare to believe that there are young men in 
this church this morning who, failing to be 
touched by every promise of their own salvation 
and every threatening of their own damnation, 
will still lift themselves up and take upon them 
the duty of men, and be soldiers of Jesus Christ, 
and have a part in the battle, and have a part 
somewhere in the victory that is sure to come. 
Don't be selfish anywhere. Don't be selfish, 
most of all, in your religion. Let yourselves 
free into your religion, and be utterly unselfish. 
Claim your freedom in service. 



THOUGHT AND ACTION. 



I want once more to read to you these words 
from the eighth chapter of the Gospel of St. 

John: 

« As He spake these words, many believed on 
Him. Then said Jesus to those Jews which be- 
lieved on Him, If ye continue in My word, then 
are ye My disciples indeed; And ye shall know 
the truth, and the truth shall make you free. 
They answered Him, We be Abraham's seed, and 
were never in bondage to any man : how sayest 
Thou, Ye shall be made free? Jesus answered 
them Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whosoever 
committeth sin is the servant of sin. And the 
servant abideth not in the house for ever : but the 
Son abideth ever. If the Son therefore shall 
make you free, ye shall be free indeed." 

There are two great regions in which the lite 
of every true man resides. They are the region 
of action and the region of thought. It is im- 
possible to separate these two regions from one 
34 



THOUGHT AND ACTION. 35 

another and to bid one man live in one of them 
alone and the other man live only in the other 
of them. It is impossible to say to the business 
man that he shall live only in the region of ac- 
tion, it is impossible to say to the scholar that 
he shall live only in the region of thought, for 
thought and action make one complete and sin- 
gle life. Thought is not simply the sea upon 
which the world of action rests, but, like the 
air which pervades the whole solid substance of 
our globe, it permeates and fills it in every part. 
It is thought which gives to it its life. It is 
thought which makes the manifestation of itself 
in every different action of man. I hope we 
are not so deluded as men have been some- 
times, as some men are to-day, that we shall try 
to separate these two lives from one another, 
and one man say, " Everything depends upon my 
action, and I care not what I think," or, as men 
have said, at least, in other times, " If I think 
right, it matters not how I act." But the right 
thought and the right action make one complete 
and single man. 

Now we have been speaking, upon these Mon- 
day noons, with regard to the freedom of that 
highest life which is lived under the inspiration 
of Jesus Christ and which we call the Christian 
life. We have claimed that it is the highest of 
all lives because it is the freest of all lives, that 



$6 ADDRESSES. 

it is the freest of all lives because it is the highest, 
and it may be that we have thought that it was 
true with regard to the active life in which men 
live, it may be that we have somehow persuaded 
ourselves, that it has seemed to us as if there 
were evidence that a man who lived his life in 
the following of Jesus Christ was a free man in 
regard to his activity. But now there comes to 
us the other thought, and it is impossible for us 
to meet together as we have met together again 
and again here without asking with regard to 
the other region of man's life and how it is with 
man there, for there are a great many people, I 
believe, who think that while the Christian faith 
offers to man a noble sphere of action and sets 
free powers that would otherwise remain un- 
changed, yet when we come to the region of 
thought or belief, there it is inevitable that man 
should know himself, when he accepts the faith 
of Jesus Christ, it is inevitable that there the 
man should become less free than it has been 
thought that he was before the blessed Saviour 
was accepted as the Master and the ruler of his 
life. Men say to themselves and to one another, 
"Yes, I shall be freer to act, I shall be nobler 
in my action, but I shall certainly enchain mind 
and spirit, I shall certainly bind myself to think 
away from the rich freedom of thought in which 
I have been inclined to live. 11 We make very 



THOUGHT AND ACTION. 2>7 

much of free thought in these days. Let us 
always remember that free thought means the 
opportunity to think, and not the opportunity 
not to think. We rejoice in the way in which 
our fathers came to this country and in their 
children perpetuated the purpose of their com- 
ing, in order that they might have freedom to 
worship God. Do we worship God? Simply to 
have attained freedom and not to use freedom for 
its true purpose, not to live within the world of 
freedom according to the life which is given to 
us there — that is to do dishonor to the freedom, 
to disown the purpose for which the freedom has 
been given to us. I want to speak to you then, 
while I may speak to-day, with regard to the 
freedom of the Christian thought. 

I want to claim, that which I believe with all 
my soul, that he who lives in the faith of Jesus 
Christ lives in the freest action of his mental 
powers, and there sees before him and makes 
himself a part of the large world into which man 
shall enter, in which he has perfect liberty and 
can exercise his powers as he could never have 
exercised them without. It is not very strange 
to think that men should have sometimes come 
to think that the religion of Jesus Christ was a 
slavery that was laid upon the mind of man, 
because very often those who have been the dis- 
ciples of that religion, those who have been the 



38 ADDRESSES. 

preachers and exponents of that religion, have 
claimed just exactly that thing. They have 
seemed to say to themselves and to one another, 
to the world to which they speak, that man does 
give up the powers of his reason when he enters 
into the powers of his faith, when he enters into 
the great realm of faith. Led by some sort of 
influence, led by some heresy with regard to the 
capacity of man, or with regard to the dealing of 
God with man, or with regard to the purposes 
of man's life upon the earth, they have been con- 
tent to say that man must give up the power of 
thought in order that he might enter into the 
Christian life and attain to all the purposes of 
the Christian discipline, they have been content 
to say that man must give up the noblest power 
of his nature in order to enter upon the highest 
life. Well might a man hesitate, hesitate what- 
ever the blessings that were offered to him in 
the fulness of the Christian experience, if he 
were called upon to give up that which made the 
very centre and glory of his life, that which 
linked him most immediately to the God from 
whom he sprang. It would be as if in the storm 
the ship should cast over its engine in order to 
save its own life. The ship might be saved a 
little while from going down in the depths of 
despair, but it never would reach the port to 
which it had been bound ; it never would accom- 



THOUGHT AND ACTION. 39 

plish the purpose of the voyage upon which it 
had set forth. Let us put absolutely away from 
us all such thoughts. Let us come under the 
inspiration of Jesus Christ Himself, who says to 
us, in these words which we have repeatedly read 
to one another, that it is the truth that is to 
make us free, and that the entrance of the man 
therefore into that freedom is the largest freedom 
of every region of man's life. 

I want to speak to you of the way in which 
my Master, Jesus Christ, appeals to the intelli- 
gence of man, of the way in which He comes to 
us in the noblest part of our nature, and claims 
us there for our true life within Himself. I 
would feel altogether wrong if I let you depart, 
if I allowed you to meet here with me week after 
week and say these words which I am privileged 
to speak to you unless I did thus claim that the 
Christian life is the largest life of the human 
intellect, that in it the noblest and central powers 
of man shall attain to their true liberty. It is 
given for us perhaps to ask ourselves for one 
moment why it is that man thinks, is ready to 
think, that he must give up the very noblest part 
of his life, his powers of thinking, in order that 
he may enter into Christianity. It seems to me 
that there are certain reasons for it which we can 
see ; but how fallacious those reasons are ! Is it 
not partly because man, when he is called upon 



40 ADDRESSES. 

to live Jesus 1 life, when he is called upon to be 
a spiritual creature, immediately sees that he is 
entering into a new and different region from 
that in which his reason has always been exer- 
cised. He has been dealing with those things 
that belong to this earth, with the different 
duties and opportunities and pleasures that 
present themselves to him every day, and that 
higher and loftier region into which he has 
entered seems to have no capacity to call forth 
those powers which he has been using in this 
lower region. And then I think again there is 
upon the souls of men who deal with Chris- 
tianity one great conviction which is very deep 
and strong. It is that the Christian religion 
cannot be absolutely that which it presents itself 
to human mankind as being, because it is so rich 
in the blessings that it offers, because it comes 
with such a large enjoyment to our human life, 
and opens such great opportunities for human 
living. Is it not because it seems to us too good 
to be true that we sometimes turn away from 
Christianity, and think that if we enter it at all 
we must enter it in the dark, that it cannot pos- 
sibly appeal to these human natures and make 
them understand its truth, and let them take it 
into their intelligence that thence it may issue 
into the soul and become the guiding power of 
the life ? Sometimes it seems as if Christianity 



THOUGHT AND ACTION. 4 1 

were so high that it was impossible that man 
should attain to it, as if it were something alto- 
gether beyond our human powers. Do you want 
me, a creature with this human body and this 
human relationship, with this body and with 
these perpetual bindings and connections with 
my fellow-men, do you want me to mount up and 
live among the stars and hold communion with 
the God of all? And if you want me to, is there 
any possibility of my doing it? Such a life is 
glorious, but not for me. It goes beyond any 
capacity that I possess. Ask yourselves, my 
friends, if something like this which I have tried 
to describe is not very often in your minds as 
you hear the magnificent invitations which Christ 
gives to the human soul to live its fullest life, 
to man to be his fullest being. There are, no 
doubt, other reasons which present themselves 
to men, and of those I do not speak. I will not 
think that the men who are listening here to me 
now, in a base and low way shrink from the evi- 
dence of Christianity and from the life of Christ 
because they do not want to enter into that re- 
ligion because it would make too great demands 
upon them in the sacrifices that they would be 
called upon to make. It is said sometimes, and 
I doubt not that it is sometimes true, that men 
will not see the power and truth of Christianity 
because they do not want to see it. It seems to 



42 



ADDRESSES. 



me that the other is also often true, and it is that 
upon which we would much rather dwell. Men 
sometimes hesitate at Christianity and tremble, 
and will not enter into the great region that is 
open to them, because they do not want it so 
intimately. The critical, the sceptical disposi- 
tion is very often born just of man's perception 
of the glory of the life that is offered to him, 
and of the intense desire that is at the bottom of 
his soul to enter into that life. Who is the man 
that criticises the ship most carefully as she lies 
at the wharf, that will see what capacity she has 
for the great voyage that she has set before her? 
Is he the man who means to linger carelessly 
upon the bank and never sail away, or the man 
who is obliged, if she can sail across the ocean, 
to go with her? Just in proportion to the depth 
of interest with which we look upon all Christian 
truth we must be deep questioners with regard 
to the truth of that truth. We must search into 
all its evidence. We must try to understand 
how it commends itself to all our minds. But 
first of all we want to know certainly what Chris- 
tianity is, if it is able to deal with the thing with 
which we are puzzling or never to give an intel- 
ligent definition of it. 

How is it now? I go to a certain man and 
ask him, "Why do you not believe in Chris- 
tianity? " and he says, " It is incredible. I can- 



THOUGHT AND ACTION. 43 

not believe in it." " What is it that you cannot 
believe in ? " and then he takes forsooth some 
little point of Christian doctrine, some specula- 
tion of some Christian teacher, some dogma of 
some Christian church, and says, "That is in- 
credible, 11 as if that were Christianity. Over and 
over again men are telling us that they do not 
believe in Christianity, when the real thing that 
they do not believe in is something that is no 
essential part of Christian faith whatsoever. 
They never have given to themselves a real def- 
inition of what the Christ and the Christianity 
in which they are called upon to believe, into 
which they are invited to enter, really is. The 
lecturer goes up and down the land and in the 
face of mighty audiences he denounces Chris- 
tianity. He declares it to be unintelligible and 
absurd, to be monstrous and brutal. And when 
you ask what it is that he is thus denouncing, 
what it is that he is thus convicting over and 
over again, you find that it is something not 
simply which makes no part of Christianity, but 
which is absolutely hostile to the spirit of Chris- 
tianity itself. Many and many a sceptical lec- 
turer is denouncing that which Christian men 
would, with all their hearts, denounce ; is de- 
claring that to be untrue which no true Christian 
thinker really believes, that which is no real part 
of the great Christian faith, which is our glory. 



44 ADDRESSES. 

Do not think when I speak thus, when I say that 
there are things attached to Christianity which 
men do not believe, that they do not believe in 
the great truth of Jesus, without them, which 
men denouncing think that they are denouncing 
the religion which is saving the world. Do not 
think that I am simply paring away our great 
Christian faith, and making it mean just as little 
as possible in order that men may accept it into 
their lives. I am coming to the heart and soul 
of it. I want to know, if my life is all bound 
up with this religion of Jesus Christ, I want to 
know intrinsically what that religion is. I will 
scatter a thousand things which in the devout 
thought of men have fastened themselves to it. 
It is but clearing the ship for action, the mak- 
ing it ready that it may do its work, the binding 
everything tight just before the storm comes on, 
for that is just the moment when nothing essen- 
tial to the ship itself must be cast away, when I 
make sure, if I can, that every plank and timber, 
that every iron and brass is in its true place and 
ready for the strain that may be put upon it. 

But what, then, is the Christian religion ? 
It is the simple following of the divine person, 
Jesus Christ, who, entering into our humanity, 
has made evident two things — the love of God 
for that humanity, and the power of that human- 
ity to answer to the love of God. The one thing 



THOUGHT AND ACTION. 45 

that the eye of the Christian sees and never can 
lose is that majestic, simple figure, great in its 
simplicity, in its innocence, in its purity and in 
its unworldliness, that walked once on this earth 
and that walks forever through the lives of men, 
showing Himself to human kind, manifest in 
human kind. The power to receive it, the 
divine life wakened in every child of man by the 
divine life manifested in Jesus Christ. That is 
the great Christian faith, and the man becomes 
a Christian in his belief when he assures himself 
that that manifestation of the divine life has 
been made and is perpetually being made, and 
he answers to that appeal of the Christ. He 
manifests his belief in action when he gives 
himself to the education and the guiding of that 
Christ, that in him there may be awakened the 
life of divinity, which is his true human life. 
Is it not glorious, this absolute simplicity of the 
Christian faith ? It is not primarily a truth ; it 
is a person, it is He who walked in Galilee and 
Judea, who sat in the houses of mankind, who 
hung upon the cross, in order that He might 
perfectly manifest how God could live and how 
man could suffer in the obedience to the life of 
God, and then sent forth out of that inspiration 
and said, " Lo, I am with you always, doing this 
very thing, being this very Saviour, even to the 
end of the world. 1 ' That which the Christian 



4 5 ADDRESSES. 

man believes to-day as a Christian, whatever 
else he may believe in his private speculation 
in his personal opinion, is this : The life of God 
manifest in Jesus of Nazareth, and thenceforth 
going out into the world wakening the divine 
capacity in every man. 

You say, "How can a man believe that? 
What evidence is there of it?" The personal 
evidence of Jesus Christ himself. It is the self 
testimony of Christ that makes the assurance of 
the Christian faith. Does that sound to you all 
unreasonable? Do you turn here in your pew 
or in your aisle and say, '< After all, it is the old 
storv which I have tested and know to be un- 
true/ 1 Suppose yourself back there in Jerusa- 
lem. Suppose the self testimony came to you 
from the very person of Jesus Christ. Suppose 
the words that He absolutely said and the deeds 
that He absolutely did bore to you a testimony 
that some greater than a human life was there 
and that then, as you pressed close to Him and 
became a part of His life, you found your own 
life awakened and became a nobler man, ashamed 
to sin, aspiring after holiness, thinking noble 
thoughts, lifting yourself not above the earth, 
but lifting yourself with the whole great earth 
which then is taken up into the presence of God 
and made sacred through and through. I know 
no man in whom I trust except by the personal 



THOUGHT AND ACTION. Atf 

evidence that he bears to me of himself. I know 
no man's nature finally but by that testimony 
which the nature gives me of him. Bring me 
all evidence that the man is trustworthy, and 
then when I am convinced I will go and stand in 
the presence of that man himself, and he shall 
tell me. So the world stood, so the world stands 
to-day in the presence of Jesus Christ. His 
presence on earth is an historic fact. The 
words that He spoke are written down in a* true 
record. The deeds that He did are the history 
of the manifestations of His character, and the 
story of His Christendom is the continued mani- 
festation of His life, the divine life in the life of 
man, made divine through Him. Now, a ques- 
tion that comes in the Christian's mind is " Why 
don't people believe this ? " Why should they 
not ? Is it not written in the historical record ? 
Has it not manifested itself in the experience of 
mankind? If it has, surely then it appeals to 
man's reason, and is not merely the act of the 
blind, stupid thing which we call faith, but it is 
the noblest action of that hour in which I be- 
lieve, in the heavens above me and in the earth 
under my feet, in the brother with whom I have 
to do in the long course of history, in the total 
humanity which has grandly lived. The reason 
that men do not believe it is that of course there 
seems to be to them some strange and previous 



48 ADDRESSES. 

presumption with regard to it, something which 
makes the story incredible. They say it is the 
supernatural in it, that it goes beyond the ordi- 
nary experience of man. Ah ! it seems also 
strange to me, the ordinary experience of man. 
Who dares to dream that human life has lived 
its completest and shown the noblest power of 
receiving God into itself ? Who dares to think 
that these few thousand years have exhausted 
this majestic and mysterious being that we call 
man? Who dares to think of his own life that, 
in these few thirty, forty, fifty years that he has 
lived, he has known and shown all that God can 
do in and for him ? Who dares to say that it is 
impossible, that it is improbable, that he who 
is the child of God shall receive some newer and 
closer access to his father, that there shall come 
some new revelation which shall be written not 
in a book, not upon the skies, not in the history 
of human kind, not on the rocks under our feet, 
but here in our human flesh, that there shall be 
an incarnation, that the God who is perpetually 
trying to manifest Himself to human kind should 
find at last, should take at last the most exqui- 
site, the most sensitive, the most perfect, the 
most divine of all material on which to write 
His message, and in that human nature show at 
once what God was and what man is ? Until 
there be some exhaustive sight of human nature 



THOUGHT AND ACTION. 49 

as that, it is in no wise improbable that there 
would be that which outgoes our observation, 
that once in the long music of our human life the 
great key-note of humanity shall be struck, that 
once in our great groping after the God who 
made us He shall seem to draw the veil aside, 
nay, more than that, shall come and like the 
sunlight crowd Himself through every cloud 
until He takes possession of our humanity. 

"Ay," but you say, "those miracles in the 
life of Jesus Christ, how strange those are ; how 
strange that He should have touched the water 
and the water become wine ; how strange that 
He should have called to the dead man and he 
should have come forth from the tomb ; how 
strange that He should have spoken to the 
waters and the storm grow still ! " Ah, my 
friends, it seems to me that there again we are 
dishonoring nature as just before we did dis- 
honor man. There again we are thinking that 
we have exhausted the capacity of this wondrous 
world in which we live. What is the glory of 
that world? That it answers to human kind. 
In the mystic tradition of the Book of Genesis 
it is told how, when God first made man, He 
set him master of this world and all its powers ; 
and, ever since, the world has been answering 
to man, who is its master, and every message 
that comes back to him, every response that the 



50 ADDRESSES. 

field makes to the farmer, or that the rock makes 
to the scientist, is but an assertion and the cul- 
mination and the fulfilment of that which God 
did back there. As man has been, so has the 
world responded to his touch and call. Suppose 
that to-morrow morning the perfect man should 
come, not the man simply of the twentieth cen- 
tury or of the twenty-first, who shall be greater 
in his humanity than we, but suppose the per- 
fect man, the perfect man because the divine 
man, comes. I cannot dream that nature shall 
not have words to say and a response to make 
to him that it will not make to these poor hands 
of mine. I can do something with the rock and 
field, I can do something with the sea and sky. 
What shall he do who is to my humanity what 
the perfect is to the absolutely and dreadfully 
imperfect? What shall the divine man do? 
When Paul speaks in that great verse of his and 
tells us how the whole creation groaneth and 
travaileth waiting for the manifestation of the 
Son of God, the whole future history of human 
science, of man's knowledge and use of the 
world, is in his words. The world shall know 
man as fast as man shows himself, and when the 
Son of God shall be manifested, then the groan- 
ing and travailing creation shall set all its powers 
free, and with the knowledge with which it floods 
him and with the usages and service with which 



THOUGHT AND ACTION. 5 I 

it supplies him, it shall claim at last its glory as 
the servant, the obedient servant of man. The 
Son of man has come. You may at least sup- 
pose it if you do not believe it. And if He came 
to-morrow morning, would not this whole world 
lift itself up and answer Him ? Who can say 
what the hills and valleys and trees and oceans 
and seas would have to say to Him who at last 
manifested that which the world had been wait- 
ing and groaning for, the manifestation, the 
complete manifestation, of the Son of God? 
That is the reason why I claim that miracles — 
I do not know that there have not been fastened 
upon the miraculous power of Jesus stories of 
things, thinking that they were done miracu- 
lously, which He did by what we choose in our 
ignorance to call the ordinary powers of nature 

— but I do know that the coming into the world 
must have been more to this world, that it 
would have been the most unnatural and incred- 
ible thing if the divine man coming here had 
been to the world and the world had been to 
him only what it is to us. 

And now the question comes to each one of us 

— for I must hasten on — how shall a man get 
within the region of that which perhaps you 
recognize, which I do not see how you can help 
believing, how shall a man get within the region 
of that higher power and let it be the rule of his 



52 ADDRESSES. 

life, let it manifest itself through him? How 
do you get within the power of any force, my 
friends? Here is Christ, a force if He is any- 
thing, not a spectacle, not a miracle, not a mar- 
vel, not wonderful to look at, but a force to feel. 
How do you get within the power of any force? 
You look out of your window, and men say the 
frost is freezing, and you see your neighbors 
wrapping their cloaks about them and going 
down the street as if they were cold. Men say 
that a storm is blowing, and you see them shelter 
themselves against the storm that blows. How 
will you make that storm a true thing for your- 
self? Go out into it. Let the frost smite your 
cheek, let the rain beat into your face, let the 
wind blow upon your back, and then you know 
by personal experience what you had known by 
your observation before. And so I say that only 
when a man puts himself where he can feel the 
power of the Christ, where it is possible for him, 
if there be a Christ, if Christ be all that the 
Christian religion claims that He is, only when 
a man puts himself where he needs and must have 
and must certainly feel that Christ, if there be 
a Christ, only then has he a right to disbelieve 
if the Christ be not there, only then has he a 
right to believe if the Christ find him there. 
And where is that? When a man takes up the 
highest duties, when he accepts the noblest life, 



THOUGHT AND ACTION. 53 

when he lays open his soul to the great exactions 
and obligations which belong to him in his 
spiritual nature, when he tries to be a pure man, 
a devoted man, a noble man, only then has he a 
chance to know that force which only then comes 
into its activity. Only when a man tries to live 
the divine life can the divine Christ manifest 
Himself to him. Therefore the true way for 
you to find Christ is not to go groping in a thou- 
sand books. It is not for you to try evidences 
about a thousand things that people have believed 
of Him, but it is for you to undertake so great a 
life, so devoted a life, so pure a life, so service- 
able a life, that you cannot do it except by Christ, 
and then see whether Christ helps you. See 
whether there comes to you the certainty that 
you are a child of God, and the manifestation of 
the child of God becomes the most credible, the 
most certain thing to you in all of history. 

It may have been that such moments have 
been in some of your lives. Think of the noblest 
moment that you ever passed, of the time when, 
lifted up to the heights of glory, or bowed down 
into the very depths of sorrow, every power that 
was in you was called forth to meet the exigency 
or to do the work. Think of the time when you 
stood upon the mountain top or plunged into the 
gulf. Remember that time — it may have been 
the death of your little child, it may have been 



54 ADDRESSES. 

your own sickness, it may have been your failure 
in business, it may have been the moment of 
your complete success in business, when you 
were solemnized as the great shower of wealth 
poured down upon you, and you felt that now 
you really had some work for God to do in the 
world. Ah, look back to that moment and see if 
then it seemed so strange to you that God should 
come into the presence and person of His uni- 
verse, of His children, and take possession of 
their life. We grow so easily to forget our 
noblest and most splendid times. It seems to 
me there is no maxim for a noble life like this : 
Count always your highest moments your truest 
moments. Believe that in the time when you 
were the greatest and most spiritual man, then 
you were your truest self. Men do just the 
other thing. They say it was "an exception, 
a derangement of my nature, an exultation, a 
frenzy, it was something that I must not expect 
again.' 1 How about the time when they plunged 
into baseness and made their soul like a dog's 
soul? They shudder at the thought of that 
because they think it would come again. Nay, 
nay, shudder if you will at the thought of that, 
but believe that the highest you ever have been 
you may be all the time, and vastly higher still 
if only the power of the Christ can occupy you 
and fill your life all the time. 



THOUGHT AND ACTION. 55 

I said that there were many things that people 
attached to Christianity that did not belong to 
Christianity. I know there are. It is impos- 
sible that a great system like the system of 
Christ, a great person like the great person of 
Christ, should be in the world, and men not have 
speculated and thought in regard to Him. Those 
are not Christianity. I want to-day, if I may 
do nothing else, to tell you absolutely how 
simple and single the Christian faith, the Christ, 
really is. It is not the inspiration of this book 
or any theory in regard to its inspiration. It 
is not the election of certain souls and the perdi- 
tion of other souls. It is not the length of man's 
punishment, whether it is going to be forever 
and ever, or whether man is to go to his restora- 
tion. It is not even the constitution of the 
divine life, the great truth of the way in which 
God lives within His own nature. None of these 
are the essence of the Christian faith, but simply 
this ; The testimony of the divine in man to the 
divine in man that lifts the man up and says : 
" For me to be brutal is unmanly ; to be divine 
is to be my only true self." Why do I believe 
in God? If some man asked me, when on the 
street, I think I should have an answer to give 
him. I could give one great reason — two great 
reasons which are really but one great reason — 
why I believe in God. I believe in God, my 



$6 ADDRESSES. 

friends, I believe in God with all my soul, be- 
cause this world is inexplicable without Him and 
explicable with Him, and because Jesus Christ 
believed in Him ; and it was Jesus Christ that 
showed me that this world demanded God and 
was inexplicable without Him; that made certain 
every suspicion and dream that I had had before, 
and Jesus Christ believed in Him. Shall I go to 
the expert about chemistry or geology and ask 
him the truth with regard to the structure of the 
world and the meeting of its atoms and forces ? 
And shall not I go to the spiritual expert, to 
him in whom the spiritual life of man has been 
clearest, and say, "O Christ, tell me what is 
the centre and source and end of all ? " When 
he says, " God," shall I not believe Him? 

It is impossible, as I have suggested to you 
again and again in what I have been saying, that 
a man can have his mind open to the receipt of 
the truth of a person unless he be a certain kind 
of man himself. I do not know but the basest 
and the wickedest man who lives may believe in 
the Copernican theory, or that two and two make 
four, yet I cannot help believing that if he were 
a better and truer man he would believe even 
those truths, outside of himself, of science and 
arithmetic, more fully and deeply. Men were 
not all astray in the first thing that they were 
seeking after, though they were wofully astray 



THOUGHT AND ACTION. $7 

in many things that they said about it, when 
they talked about faith and works. Faith enters 
in through the soul that does a noble deed, and 
in the coming in of that faith the higher deed 
becomes possible to him. Hear the words that 
Jesus said, words that our age must take to itself 
until it shall be wiser than it is to-day : " Blessed 
are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." 
" If any man will do His will, he shall know of 
the doctrine, whether it be of God." Ponder 
those words, my friends. See how reasonable 
they are. See how important they are. See 
how they have the secret of your own life, of 
what it is to do, of what it is to be, forever and 
ever sealed up in them. These two things, I am 
sure, are true with regard to the method of belief 
— that no man can ever go forward to a higher 
belief until he is true to the faith which he 
already holds. Be the noblest man that your 
present faith, poor and weak and imperfect as it 
is, can make you to be. Live up to your present 
growth, your present faith. So, and so only, as 
you take the next straight step forward, as you 
stand strong where you are now, so only can you 
think the curtain will draw back and there will 
be revealed to you what lies beyond. And then 
live in your positives and not in your negatives. 
I am tired of asking man what his religious faith 
is and having him tell me what he don't believe. 



58 ADDRESSES. 

He tells me that he don't believe in baptism or 
inspiration or in the trinity. If I asked a man 
where he was going and he told me he was not 
going to Washington, what could I know about 
where he was going ? He would not go any- 
where so long as he simply rested in that mere 
negative. Be done with saying what you don't 
believe, and find somewhere or other the truest, 
divinest thing to your soul that you do believe 
to-day, and work that out : work it out in all the 
action and consecration of the soul in the doing 
of your work. This I take to be the real free- 
dom of Christian thought — when the man goes 
forward always into a fuller and fuller belief as 
he becomes obedient to that which he already 
holds. 

But yet I know I have not touched the opin- 
ion, the feeling, nay, I will say the black preju- 
dice that is upon many, many minds. " Ah, 
but you have bound yourself," you say. " You 
have given your assent to a certain creed, you 
believe certain dogmas. To put it as simply as 
you have put it to us this morning, you believe 
a certain person. I, I am free, I believe nothing, 
I can go wandering here and everywhere and 
disbelieve to my heart's content." Yes, I do 
believe something, and I thank God for it. But 
I deny with all my intelligence and soul the very 
idea that in believing that something I have shut 



THOUGHT AND ACTION. 59 

my soul to evidence. I am ready to hear any 
man living, any man living to-day who will prove 
to me that the Christ has never lived and that he 
is not the Lord of men. I will listen to any man 
who is in earnest and who is sincere. I will not 
listen to any trifler, caviller, who is merely try- 
ing to make a point and to get ahead of the poor 
arguments that I can use ; but let any fellow-man 
come to me with an earnest face, either of puzzled 
doubt, or of earnest and convinced unbelief, and 
say to me, "Are you not wrong ? " or " I believe 
that you are wrong," and I, of course, will talk 
to him. Do I want to believe anything that 
cannot be proved to be true, anything that my 
intelligence shall not receive ? Why should I 
believe it ? Shall I trust myself to the ship 
merely because I have refused to examine its 
timbers, when men tell me that it is unsound ? 
Shall I throw away my truthfulness simply for 
the sake of holding what I want, what I choose 
to call the truth ? It is not because it is safe, 
it is not because it is pleasant, it is because it 
seems to the Christian man to be true, that the 
Christian man believes in the presence, the life, 
the power of Jesus Christ. Therefore come, let 
me hear every one of you what you have to say. 
Let me see where that upon which my soul rests 
for its very life breaks down ; but, until I hear, 
I will go forward, strong in the assurance of that 



60 ADDRESSES. 

which takes hold of all my life, convinces my 
reason, lays hold of my affections, enlarges my 
actions, and opens my whole being to the free- 
dom of the child of God. 

And why should not you, my friends, why 
should not you ? I honor the sceptic, the faith- 
ful and devout sceptic, with all my soul. I am 
no scorner of the man who, without scorn, finds 
it impossible to accept that which to my soul 
seems to be the absolute truth. I will scorn 
only that which God scorns. He scorns the 
scorner, and only the scorning man is worthy 
of the scorn of human kind. But while I honor 
the sceptic, while I invite him to make manifest 
his scepticism, not merely for his sake but for 
my own, I will not hold, I cannot hold that he 
is living a larger life than the man whom the 
Christ invites to every noble duty, to every faith- 
ful fulfilment of himself. I will feel that he, per- 
haps by the necessity of his nature, perhaps by 
his circumstances, perhaps by something which 
came down to him from his ancestors, is shut in, 
is a contained and hampered and hindered man, 
and I will long for the day when he, lifting up 
his eyes, sees that Christ walking in the midst 
of humanity, and yet at the head of humanity, 
manifesting our human nature, but outgoing our 
human nature, glorifying our streets while He 
interprets our streets for the first time into their 



THOUGHT AND ACTION. 6 1 

full meaning, giving to our shops and houses a 
radiancy which they have expected and dreamed 
of, but never felt, and tempting us always into 
a deeper belief in Him, which, embodying itself 
in a completer consecration to the right and true, 
shall lead us on into the fulness which he fills. 
Can I, can you, have Christ in human history, 
Christ in the world, and live as if He were not 
here ? Will you not give yourself to that of Him 
which you know to-day ? Will you not at least 
lay hold of the very skirts of His garment and 
say, " I see that Thou art good, I see that Thou 
art true. Lead me into the goodness and truth 
which by communion and sympathy shall know 
Thee more. Lord, I believe. I believe just a 
little. Lord, I know that that must come which 
Thou hast said has come in Thee. I would enter 
into Thee, to see whether it has indeed come in 
Thee, and Thou shalt lead me, Thou shalt teach 
me. Lord, I believe. I have not grasped Thee. 
No man has grasped Thee. The man who says 
that he has grasped Thee proves thereby that 
he does not know Thee. I know that I have not 
grasped Thee, but I will follow Thee by doing 
righteousness, by serving truth, by knowing 
and acknowledging Thee until all of that 
shall become clear to me. I will follow Thee, 
and Thou shalt lead me into the glory which 
Thou Thyself abidest in. Lord, I believe, 



62 ADDRESSES. 

Lord, I believe, help Thou mine unbelief. 1 ' 
The story of the present, the hope, the pure, 
certain hope of the future is in those great 
words: "Lord, I believe, help Thou mine 
unbelief." 



THE DUTY OF THE CHRISTIAN 
BUSINESS MAN. 



I will read to you once again the words 
which I have read before, the words of Jesus in 
the eighth chapter of the Gospel of St. John : 

" As He spake these words, many believed on 
Him. Then said Jesus to those Jews which 
believed on Him, If ye continue in My word, 
then are ye My disciples indeed ; and ye shall 
know the truth, and the truth shall make you 
free. They answered Him, We be Abraham's 
seed, and were never in bondage to any man : 
how sayest Thou, Ye shall be made free ? Jesus 
answered them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, 
Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin. 
And the servant abideth not in the house for- 
ever : but the Son abideth ever. If the Son 
therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free 
indeed." 

I do not know how any man can stand and 

63 



64 ADDRESSES. 

plead with his brethren for the higher life, that 
they will enter into and make their own the life 
of Christ and God, unless he is perpetually con- 
scious that around them with whom he pleads 
there is the perpetual pleading and the voice of 
God Himself. Unless a man believes that, every- 
thing that he has to say must seem, in the first 
place, impertinent, and, in the second place, 
almost absolutely hopeless. Who is man that 
he shall plead with his fellow-man for the change 
of a life, for the entrance into a whole new 
career, for the alteration of a spirit, for the sur- 
rounding of himself with a new region in which 
he has not lived before ? But if it be so, that 
God is pleading with every one of His children 
to enter into the highest life; if it be so, that 
God is making His application and His appeal 
to every soul to know Him, and in Him to know 
himself, then one may plead with earnestness 
and plead with great hopefulness before his 
brethren. And so it is. The great truth of 
Jesus Christ is that, that God is pleading with 
every soul, not merely in the words which we 
hear from one another, not merely in the words 
which we read from His book, but in every influ- 
ence of life ; and, in those unknown influences 
which are too subtle for us to understand or per- 
ceive. God is forever seeking after the souls of 
His children. 



THE CHRISTIAN BUSINESS MAN. 6$ 

I cannot stand before you for the last time 
that I shall stand in these meetings, my friends, 
without reminding myself and without remind- 
ing you of that ; without reminding myself also 
and without trying to remind you of how abso- 
lutely conformable it is to everything that man 
does in this world. The great richness of nature, 
the great richness of life, comes when we under- 
stand that behind every specific action of man 
there is some one of the more elemental and 
primary forces of the universe that are always 
trying to express themselves. There is nothing 
that man does that finds its beginning within 
itself, but everything, every work of every trade, 
of every occupation, is simply the utterance of 
some one of those great forces which lie behind 
all life, and in the various ways of the different 
generations and of the different men are always 
trying to make their mark upon the world. 
Behind the power that the man exercises there 
always lies the great power of life, the continual 
struggle of nature to write herself in the life and 
work of man, the power of beauty struggling to 
manifest itself, the harmony that is always de- 
siring to make itself known. To the merchant 
there are the great laws of trade, of which his 
works are but the immediate expression. To 
the mechanic there are the continual forces of 
nature, gravitation uttering itself in all its 



66 ADDRESSES. 

majesty, made no less majestic because it sim- 
ply takes its expression for the moment in some 
particular exercise of his art. To the ship that 
sails upon the sea there are the everlasting winds 
that come out of the treasuries of God and fulfil 
His purpose in carrying His children to their 
destination. There is no perfection of the uni- 
verse and of the special life of man in the uni- 
verse until it comes to this. The greatest of all 
forces are ready without condescension, are ready 
as the true expression of their life, to manifest 
themselves in the particular activities which we 
find everywhere, and which are going on every- 
where. The little child digs his well in the sea- 
shore sand, and the great Atlantic, miles deep, 
miles wide, is stirred all through and through to 
fill it for him. Shall it not be so then here 
to-day, and shall it not be the truth, upon which 
we let our minds especially dwell, and which we 
keep in our souls all the time that I am speaking 
and you are listening, that however He may be 
hidden from our sight God is the ultimate fact 
and the final purpose and power of the universe, 
and that everything that man tries to do for his 
fellow-man is but the expression of that love of 
God which is everywhere struggling to utter 
itself in blessing, to give itself away to the soul 
of every one for whom He cares ? 

It is in this truth that I find the real secret, 



THE CHRISTIAN BUSINESS MAN 6j 

the deepest meaning, of the everlasting dissatis- 
faction of man that is always ready to be stirred. 
We moralize, we philosophize about the discon- 
tent of man. We give little reasons for it ; but 
the real reason of it all is this, that which every- 
thing lying behind it really signifies : that man is 
greater than his circumstances, and that God 
is always calling to him to come up to the ful- 
ness of his life. Dreadful will be the day when 
the world becomes contented, when one great 
universal satisfaction spreads itself over the 
world. Sad will be the day for every man when 
he becomes absolutely contented with the life 
that he is living, with the thoughts that he is 
thinking, with the deeds that he is doing, when 
there is not forever beating at the doors of his 
soul some great desire to do something larger, 
which he knows that he was meant and made to 
do because he is the child of God. And there 
is the real secret of the man's struggle with his 
sins. It is not simply the hatefulness of the 
sin, as we have said again and again, but it is 
the dim perception, the deep suspicion, the real 
knowledge at the heart of the man, that there is 
a richer and a sinless region in which it is really 
meant for him to dwell. Man stands separated 
from that life of God, as it were, by a great, 
thick wall, and every effort to put away his sin, 
to make himself a nobler and a purer man, is 



68 ADDRESSES. 

simply his beating at the inside of that door 
which stands between him and the life of God, 
which he knows that he ought to be living. It 
is like the prisoner hidden in his cave, who feels 
through all the thick wall that shuts him out 
from it the sunlight and the joyous life that is 
outside, who knows that his imprisonment is not 
his true condition, and so with every tool that 
his hands can grasp and with his bleeding hands 
themselves beats on the stone, that he may find 
his way out. And the glory and the beauty of 
it is that while he is beating upon the inside 
of the wall there is also a noble power praying 
upon the outside of that wall, The life to which 
he ought to come is striving in its turn, upon its 
side, to break away the hindrance that is keep- 
ing him from the thing he ought to be, that is 
keeping him from the life he ought to live. 
God, with His sunshine and lightning, with the 
great majestic manifestations of Himself, and 
with all the peaceful exhibitions of His life, is 
forever trying, upon His side of the wall, to 
break away the great barrier that separates the 
sinner's life from Him. Great is the power, 
great is the courage of the sinner, when through 
the thickness of the walls he feels that beating 
life of God. when he knows that he is not work- 
ing alone, when he is sure that God is wanting 
him just as truly, far more truly, than he wants 



THE CHRISTIAN BUSINESS MAN 69 

God. He bears himself to a nobler struggle 
with his enemy and a more determined effort to 
break down the resistance that stands between 
him and the higher life. Our figure is all imper- 
fect, as all our figures are so imperfect, because 
it seems to be the man all by himself, working 
by himself, until he shall come forth into the 
life of God, as if God waited there to receive him 
when he came forth the freed man, and as if the 
working of the freedom upon the sinner's side 
had not something also of the purpose of God 
within him. God is not merely in the sunshine ; 
God is in the cavern of the man's sin. God is 
with the sinner wherever he can be. There is 
no soul so black in its sinfulness, so determined 
in its defiant obstinacy, that God has abandoned 
his throne room at the centre of the sinner's life, 
and every movement is the God movement and 
every effort is the God force, with which man 
tries to break forth from his sin and come forth 
into the full sunlight of a life with God. Do 
you not think how full of hope it is ? Do you 
not see that when this great conception of the 
universe, which is Christ's conception, which 
beamed in every look that He shed upon the 
world, which was told in every word that He 
spoke and which was in every movement of His 
hand — do you not see how, when this great con- 
ception of the universe takes possession of a man, 



JO ADDRESSES. 

then all his struggle with his sin is changed, it 
becomes a strong struggle, a glorious struggle. 
He hears perpetually the voice of Christ, " Be 
of good cheer. I have overcome the world. 
You shall overcome it by the same strength 
which overcame with Me." 

And then another thing. When a man comes 
forth into the fulness of that life with God, 
when at last he has entered God's service and 
the obedience to God's will, and the communion 
with God's life, then there comes this wonder- 
ful thing, there comes the revelation of the man's 
past. We dare to tell the man that if he enters 
into the divine life, if he makes himself a ser- 
vant of God and does God's will out of obedient 
love, he shall then be strong and wise. One 
great element of his strength is going to be this : 
A marvellous revelation that is to come to him 
of how all his past has been filled with the power 
of that spirit with which he has at last entered 
into communion, to which he has at last sub- 
mitted himself. Man becomes the child of God, 
becomes the servant of Jesus Christ, and this 
marvellous revelation amazes him. He sees that 
back through all the years of his most obstinate 
and careless life, through all his wilfulness and 
resistance, through all his profligacy and black 
sin, God has been with him all the time, beat- 
ing himself upon his life, showing him how He 



THE CHRISTIAN BUSINESS MAN. J I 

desired to call him to Himself, and that the 
final submission does not win God. It simply 
submits to the God who has been with the soul 
all the time. Can there be anything more win- 
ning to the soul than that, anything that brings 
a deeper shame to you, than to have it revealed 
to you, suddenly or slowly, that from the first 
day that you came into this world, nay, before 
your life was an uttered fact in this world, God 
has been loving you, and seeking you, and plan- 
ning for you, and making every effort that He 
could make in consistency with the free will 
with which He endowed you from the centre of 
His own life, that you might become His and 
therefore might become truly yourself? Through 
all the years in which you were obstinate and 
rebellious, through all the years in which you 
defied Him, nay, through the years in which you 
denied Him and said that He did not exist, He 
was with you all the time. What shall I say to 
my friend who is an atheist? Shall I believe 
that until he comes to a change of his opinions 
and recognizes that there is indeed a ruling love, 
a great and fatherly God for all the world, that 
he has nothing to do with that God ? Shall I 
believe that God has nothing to do with him 
uutil he acknowledges God? God would be no 
God to me if He were that, if He left the man 
absolutely unhelped until the man beat at the 



72 ADDRESSES. 

doors of His divine helpfulness and said, " I be- 
lieve in Thee at last. Now help me." And to 
the atheist there appears the light of the God 
whom he denies. Into every soul, just so far 
and just so fast as it is possible for that soul to 
receive it, God beats His life and gives His help. 
That is what makes a man hopeful of all his fel- 
low-men as he looks around upon them and sees 
them in all the conditions of their life. 

And this could only be if that were true, if 
that is true, which we are dwelling upon con- 
stantly, the absolute naturalness of the Christian 
life, that it is man's true life, that it is no foreign 
region into which some man may be transported 
and where he lives an alien to all his own essen- 
tial nature and to all the natural habitudes in 
which he is intending to exist. There are two 
ideas of religion which always have abounded, 
and our great hope is, our great assurance for 
the future of the world is, that the true and pure 
idea of religion some day shall grow and take 
possession of the life of man. One idea, held 
by very earnest people, embodied in very faith- 
ful and devoted lives, is the strangeness of re- 
ligion to the life of man, as if some morning 
something dropped out of the sky that had had no 
place upon our earth before, as if there came the 
summons to man to be something entirely differ- 
ent from what the conditions of his nature proph- 



THE CHRISTIAN BUSINESS MAN 73 

esied and intended that he should be. The other 
idea is that religion comes by the utterance of 
God from the heavens, but comes up out of the 
human life of man ; that man is essentially and 
intrinsically religious ; that he does not become 
something else than man when he becomes the 
servant of Jesus Christ, but then for the first time 
he becomes man ; that religion is not something 
that is fastened upon the outside of his life, but 
is the awakening of the truth inside of his life ; 
the Church is but the true fulfilment of human 
life and society ; heaven is but the New Jerusalem 
that completes all the old Jerusalem and Londons 
and Bostons that have been here upon our earth. 
Man, in the fulfilment of his nature by Jesus 
Christ, is man — not to be something else, our 
whole humanity is too dear to us. I will cling 
to this humanity of man, for I do love it, and I 
will know nothing else. But when man is bid- 
den to look back into his humanity and see what 
it means to be a man, that humanity means pu- 
rity, truthfulness, earnestness, and faithfulness to 
that God of which humanity is a part, that God 
which manifested that humanity was a part of it, 
when the incarnation showed how close the 
divine and human belonged together — when 
man hears that voice, I do not know how he can 
resist, why he shall not lift himself up and say, 
" Now I can be a man, and I can be man only as 



74 ADDRESSES. 

I share in and give my obedience to and enter 
into communion with the life of God," and say 
to Christ, to Christ the revealer of all this, 
" Here I am, fulfil my manhood. 1 ' 

And do not you see how immediately this 
sweeps aside, as one gush of the sunlight sweeps 
aside the darkness, jdo not you see how it sweeps 
aside all the foolish and little things that people 
are saying? I say to my friend, "Be a Chris- 
tian. 1 ' That means to be a full man. And he 
says to me, " I have not time to be a Christian. 
I have not room. If my life was not so full. 
You don't know how hard I work from morning 
to night. What time is there for me to be a 
Christian? What time is there, what room is 
there for Christianity in such a life as mine?" 
But does not it come to seem to us so strange, so 
absurd, if it was not so melancholy, that man 
should say such a thing as that? It is as if the 
engine had said it had no room for the steam. 
It is as if the tree had said it had no room for the 
sap. It is as if the ocean had said it had no room 
for the tide. It is as if the man said that he had 
no room for his soul. It is as if life said that it 
had no time to live, when it is life. It is not 
something that is added to life. It is life. A 
man is not living without it. And for a man to 
say that "lam so full in life that I have no room 
for life," you see immediately to what absurdity 



THE CHRISTIAN BUSINESS MAN ?$ 

it reduces itself. And how a man knows what 
he is called upon by God's voice, speaking to him 
every hour, speaking to him every moment, speak- 
ing to him out of everything, that which the man 
is called upon to do because it is the man's only 
life ! Therefore time, room, that is what time, 
that is what room is for — life. Life is the thing 
we seek, and man finds it in the fulfilment of his 
life by Jesus Christ. 

Now, until we understand thic and take it in 
its richness, all religion seems, becomes to us 
such a little thing that it is not religion at all. 
You have got to know that religion, the service 
of Christ, is not something to be taken in in ad- 
dition to your life ; it is your life. It is not a rib- 
bon that you shall tie in your hat, and go down 
the street declaring yourself that you have ac- 
cepted something in addition to the life which 
your fellow-men are living. It is something 
which, taken into your heart, shall glow in every 
action so that your fellow-men shall say, " Lo, 
how he lives ! What new life has come into 
him?" It is that insistence upon the great 
essentialness of the religious life, it is the insist- 
ence that religion is not a lot of things that a 
man does, but is a new life that a man lives, 
uttering itself in new actions because it is the 
new life. " Except a man be born again he can- 
not see the kingdom of God." So Jesus said to 



»g ADDRESSES. 

Nicodemus the ruler, Nieodemus the amateur in 
religions, who came and said, " Perhaps tins 
teacher has something else that 1 can bind into 
my catalogue of truths and hold it." Jesus 
looked him in the face and said : " It is not that, 
my friend, it is not that ; it is to be a new man, 
it'is to be born again. It is to have the new- 
life which is the old life, which is the eternal 
life. So alone does man enter into the king- 
dom of God." I cannot help believing all the 
time that if our young men knew this, religion 
would lift itself up and have a dignity and great- 
ness -not a thing for weak souls, but a thing 
for the manliest soul. Just because of 'its ; man- 
liness it is easy. -Is it easy or is it hard, this 
religion of yours?" people say to us I am sure 
I do not know the easy and the hard things I 
cannot tell the difference. What is easier than 
for a man to brtothe ? And yet, have you never 
seen a breathless man, a man in whom the 
breathing was almost stopped, a drowning man 
an exhausted man? have you never seen, when 
the breath was put once more to his nostn s and 
brought down once more into his empty lungs 
the struggle with which he came back to it? It 
was the hardest thing for him to do, so much 
harder for him to live than it was for h.m to die 
But by and by see him on his feet, going about 
his work, helping his fellow-men, living his life, 



THE CHRISTIAN BUSINESS MAN J 7 

rejoicing in his days, guarding against his dan- 
gers, full of life. Is life a hard thing for him? 
You don't talk about its being hard or easy any 
more than you talk about life itself. The man 
who lives in God knows no life except the life 
of God. Let men know that it is not mere 
trifling, it is not a thing to be dallied with for 
an instant, it is not a thing for a man to con- 
vince himself by an argument, and then keep as 
it were locked in a shelf : it is something that is 
so deep and serious, so deep and serious that 
when a man has once tested it there is no more 
chance of his going out of it than there is of his 
going out of the friendship and the love which 
holds him with its perpetual expression, with 
the continued deeper and deeper manifestation 
of the way in which the living being belongs to 
him who has a right to his life. 

Now in the few moments that remain I want 
to take it for granted most seriously, most ear- 
nestly, that the men who are listening to me are 
in earnest, and I want to try to tell them as a 
brother might tell a brother, as I might tell to 
you or try to tell to you if sitting before my fire- 
side, I want to try to answer the question which 
I know is upon your hearts. " What shall I do 
about this?" I know you say; "Is this all in 
the clouds ? Is there anything I can do in the 
right way? 1 ' If you are in earnest, I shall try 



yg ADDRESSES. 

to tell you what I should do, if I were in your 
place, that I might enter into that life and be 
the free man that we have tried to describe, of 
whom we believe certain special and definite 
things. What are they? In the first place I 
woufd put away my sin. There is not a man 
listening to me now who has not some trick of 
life, some habit that has possession of him, 
which he knows is a wrong thing. The very 
first thing for a man to do is absolutely to set 
himself against them. If you are foul, stop 
being licentious, at least stop doing licentious 
things. If you, in any part of your business, 
are "tricky, and unsound, and unjust, cut that 
off, no matter what it costs you. There is 
something clear and definite enough for every 
man. It is as clear for every man as the sun- 
light that smites him in his eyes. Stop doing 
the bad thing which you are doing. It is draw- 
ing the bolt away to let whatever mercy may 
come in come in. Stop doing your sin. You 
can do that if you will. Stop doing your sin, 
no matter how mechanical it seems, and then 
take up vour duty, whatever you can do to make 
the world more bright and good. Do whatever 
you can to help every struggling soul, to add 
new strength to any staggering cause, the poor 
sick man that is by you, the poor wronged man 
whom you with your influence might vindicate, 



THE CHRISTIAN BUSINESS MAN 79 

the poor boy in your shop that you may set with 
new hope upon the road of life that is beginning 
already to look dark to him. I cannot tell you 
what it is. But you know your duty. No man 
ever looked for it and did not find it. 

And then the third thing — pray. Yes, go 
to the God whom you but dimly see and pray to 
Him in the darkness, where He seems to sit. 
Ask Him, as if He were, that He will give you 
that which, if He is, must come from Him, can 
come from Him alone. Pray anxiously. Pray 
passionately, in the simplest of all words, with 
the simplest of all thoughts. Pray, the manli- 
est thing that a man can do, the fastening of his 
life to the eternal, the drinking of his thirsty 
soul out of the great fountain of life. And pray 
distinctly. Pray upon your knees. One grows 
tired sometimes of the free thought, which is 
yet perfectly true, that a man can pray anywhere 
and anyhow. But men have found it good to 
make the whole system pray. Kneel down, and 
the very bending of these obstinate and unused 
knees of yours will make the soul kneel down in 
the humility in which it can be exalted in the 
sight of God. 

And then read your Bible. How cold that 
sounds! What, read a book to save my soul? 
Read an old story that my life in these new days 
shall be regenerated and saved? Yes, do just 



80 ADDRESSES. 

that, for out of that book, if you read it truly, 
shall come the divine and human person. If 
you can read it with your soul as well as with 
your eyes, there shall come the Christ there 
walking in Palestine. You shall see Him so 
much greater than the Palestine in which he 
walks, that at one word of prayer, as you bend 
over the illuminated page, there shall lift up that 
body-being of the Christ, and come down through 
the centuries and be your helper at your side. 
So read your Bible. 

And then seek the Church — oh, yes, the 
Church. Do you think, my friends, you who 
stand outside the Church, and blame her for her 
inconsistencies, and tell of her shortcomings, 
and point out the corruptions that are in her 
history, all that are in her present life to-day — 
do you really believe that there is an earnest man 
in the Church that does not know the Church's 
weaknesses and faults just as well as you do? 
Do you believe that there is one of us living in 
the life and heart of the Church who don't think 
with all his conscience, who don't in every day in 
deep distress and sorrow know how the Church 
fails of the great life of the Master, how far she 
is from being what God meant she should be, 
what she shall be some day? But all the more I 
will put my life into that Church, all the more 
I will drink the strength that she can give to me 



THE CHRISTIAN BUSINESS MAN 8 1 

and make what humble contribution to her I can 
bring of the earnestness and faithfulness of my 
life. Come into the Church of Jesus Christ. 
There is no other body on the face of the earth 
that represents what she represents — the noble 
destiny of the human soul, the great capacity of 
human faith, the inexhaustible and unutterable 
love of God, the Christ, who stands to manifest 
them all. 

Now those are the things for a man to do who 
really cares about all this. Those are the things 
for an earnest man to do. They have no power 
in themselves, but they are the opening of the 
windows. And if that which I believe is true, 
God is everywhere giving himself to us, the 
opening of the windows is a signal that we want 
Him and an invitation that He will be glad 
enough to answer, to come. Into every window 
that is open to Him and turned His way, Christ 
comes, God comes. That is the only story. 
There is put aside everything else. Election, 
predestination, they can go where they please. 
I am sure that God gives Himself to every soul 
that wants Him and declares its want by the 
open readiness of the signal which He knows. 
How did the sun rise on our city this morning? 
Starting up in the east, the sun came in its 
majesty into the sky. It smote on the eastward 
windows, and wherever the window was all 



82 ADDRESSES. 

closed, even if it were turned eastward, on the 
sacred side of the city's life, it could not come 
in ; but wherever any eastward window had its 
curtains drawn, wherever he who slept had left 
the blinds shut, so that the sun when it came 
might find its way into his sleepiness, there the 
sun came, and with a shout awoke its faithful 
servant who had believed in him even before he 
had seen him, and said, " Arise, arise from the 
dead, and I will give thee life.' 1 This is the 
simplicity of it all, my friends. A multitude of 
other things you need not trouble yourselves 
about. I amaze myself when I think how men 
go asking about the questions of eternal punish- 
ment and the duration of man's torment in 
another life, of what will happen to any man 
who does not obey Jesus Christ. Oh, my 
friends, the soul is all wrong when it asks that. 
Not until the soul says, " What will come if I 
do obey Jesus Christ? 1 ' and opens its glorified 
vision to see all the great things that are given to 
the soul that enters into the service of the per- 
fect one, the perfect love, not until then the per- 
fect love, the perfect life, come in. A man may 
be — I believe it with all my heart — so abso- 
lutely wrapped up in the glory of obedience, and 
the higher life, and the service of Christ, that 
he never once asks himself, " What will come to 
me if I do not obey?" any more than your child 



THE CHRISTIAN BUSINESS MAN 83 

asks you what you will do to him if he is not 
obedient. Every impulse and desire of his life 
sets toward obedience. And so the soul may 
have no theory of everlasting or of limited pun- 
ishment, or of the other life. 

Simply now, here, he must have that without 
which he cannot live, that without which there 
is no life. Jesus the soul must have, the one 
yesterday, to-day, and forever ; He that is and 
was and is to be. Men dwell upon what He was, 
upon what He is ; I rather think to-day of what 
He is to be. And when I see these young men 
here before me looking to the future and not to 
the past, — nay, looking to the future and not to 
the present, valuing the present only as it is the 
seed ground of the future, the foundation upon 
which the structure is to rise whose pinnacle 
shall some day pierce the sky, — I want to tell 
them of the Jesus that shall be. In fuller com- 
prehension of Him, with deeper understanding 
of His life, with a more entire impression of 
what He is and of what He may be to the soul, 
so men shall understand Him in the days to be, 
and yet He shall be the same Christ still. The 
future belongs to Jesus Christ, yes, the same 
Christ that I believe in and that I call upon you 
to believe in to-day, but a larger, fuller, more 
completely comprehended Christ, the Christ that 
is to be, the same Christ that was and suffered, 



84 ADDRESSES. 

the same Christ that is and helps, but the same 
Christ also who, being forever deeper and deeper 
and more deeply received into the souls of men, 
regenerates their institutions, changes their life, 
opens their capacities, surprises them with them- 
selves, makes the world glorious and joyous 
every day, because it has become the new incar- 
nation, the new presence of the divine life in the 
life of man. 

Men are talking about the institutions in which 
you are engaged, my friends, about the business 
from which you have come here to worship for 
this little hour. Men are questioning about 
what they care to do, what they can have to do 
with Christianity. They are asking everywhere 
this question : " Is it possible for a man to be 
engaged in the activities of our modern life and 
yet to be a Christian ? Is it possible for a man 
to be a broker, a shopkeeper, a lawyer, a me- 
chanic, is it possible for a man to be engaged in 
a business of to-day, and yet love his God and 
his fellow-man as himself ? "' I do not know, I 
do not know what transformations these dear 
businesses of yours have got to undergo before 
they shall be true and ideal homes for the child 
of God ; but I do know that upon Christian mer- 
chants and Christian brokers and Christian law- 
yers and Christian men in business to-day there 
rests an awful and a beautiful responsibility : to 



THE CHRIST! AX BCS/XESS .VAX. 85 

prove, if you can prove it, that these things are 
capable of being made divine, to prove that a 
man can do the work that you have been doing 
this morning and will do this afternoon, and yet 
shall love his God and his fellow-man as himself. 
If he cannot, if he cannot, what business have 
you to be doing them ? If he can, what business 
have you to be doing them so poorly, so carnally, 
so unspiritually, that men look on them and 
shake their heads with doubt ? It belongs to 
Christ in men first to prove that man may be a 
Christian and yet do business ; and, in the sec- 
ond place, to show how a man, as he becomes a 
greater Christian, shall purify and lift the busi- 
ness that he does and make it the worthy occu- 
pation of the Son of God. 

What shall be our universal law of life? Can 
we give it as we draw toward our last moment ? 
I think we can. I want to live, I want to live, 
if God will give me help, such a life that, if all 
men in the world were living it, this world 
would be regenerated and saved. I want to live 
such a life that, if that life changed into new 
personal peculiarities as it went to different 
men, but the same life still, if every man were 
living it, the millennium would be here ; nay, 
heaven would be here, the universal presence of 
God. Are you living that life now ? Do you 
want your life multiplied by the thousand mil- 



ADDRESSES. 



lion so that all men shall be like you, or don't 
you shudder at the thought, don't you give hope 
that other men are better than you are ? Keep 
that fear, but only that it may be the food of a 
diviner hope, that all the world may see in you 
the thing that man was meant to be, that is, the 
Christ. Ah, you say, that great world, it is too 
big ; how can I stretch my thought and imagina- 
tion and conscience to the poor creatures in 
Africa and everywhere ? Then bring it home. 
Ah, this dear city of ours, this city that we love, 
this city in which many of us were born, in 
which all of us are finding the rich and sweet 
associations of our life, this city, whose very 
streets we love because they come so close to 
everything we do and are, cannot we do some- 
thing for it ? Cannot we make its life diviner ? 
Cannot we contribute something that it has not 
to-day ? Cannot you put in it, some little corner 
of it, a life which others shall see and say, "Ah, 
that our lives may be like that ! " And then the 
good Boston in which we so rejoice, which we 
so love, which we would so fain make a part of 
the kingdom of God, a true city of Jesus Christ, 
we shall not die without having done something 
for it. 

I linger, and yet I must not linger. Oh, my 
friends, oh, my fellow-men, it is not very long 
that we shall be here. It is not very long. This 



THE CHRISTIAN BUSINESS MAN 87 

life for which we are so careful — it is not very 
long ; and yet it is so long, because, long, long 
after we have passed away out of men's sight and 
out of men's memory, the world, with something 
that we have left upon it, that we have left within 
it, will be going on still. It is so long because, 
long after the city and the world have passed 
away, we shall go on somewhere, somehow, the 
same beings still, carrying into the depths of 
eternity something that this world has done for us 
that no other world could do, something of good- 
ness to get now that will be of value to us a mil- 
lion years hence, that we never could get unless 
we got it in the short years of this earthly life. 
Will you know it? Will you let Christ teach it 
to you? Will you let Christ tell you what is the 
perfect man? Will you let Him set His sim- 
plicity and graciousness close to your life, and 
will you feel their power? Oh! be brave, be 
true, be pure, be men, be men in the power of 
Jesus Christ. May God bless you! May God 
bless you ! Let us pray. 



TRUE LIBERTY. 



An earnest appeal to all that enter that Lib- 
erty. May I read to you a few words from the 
eighth chapter of St. John? " Then said Jesus 
to those Jews which believed on Him, If ye 
continue in my word, then are ye my disciples 
indeed ; and ye shall know the truth, and the 
truth shall make you free. 11 

Let us not think, my friends, that there is 
anything strange about the spectacle which we 
witnessed this morning. The only strange thing 
that there could be about it is that anybody 
should think that it is strange that men should 
turn aside for half an hour from their ordinary 
business pursuits, that they should come from 
the details of life to inquire in regard to the 
principles, the everlasting principles and pur- 
poses of life ; that they should turn aside from 
those things which are occupying them from day 
to day and make one single hour in the week 
consecrated to the service of those great things 



TRUE LIBERTY. 89 

which underlie all life — surely there is nothing 
very strange. There is nothing more absolutely 
natural. Every man does it in his own sort of 
way, in his own choice of time. We have chosen 
to do it together, on one day of the week during 
these few weeks which the Christian Church has 
so largely set apart for special thought and prayer 
and earnest attempt to approach the God to whom 
we belong. It is simply as if the stream turned 
back again to its fountain, that it might refresh 
itself and make itself strong for the great work 
that it had to do in watering the fields and turn- 
ing the wheels of industry. It is simply as if 
men plodding along over the flat routine of their 
life chose once in a while to go up into the moun- 
tain top, whence they might once in awhile look 
abroad over their life, and understand more fully 
the way in which they ought to work. These 
are the principles, these are the pictures which 
represent that which we have in mind as we 
come together for a little while each Monday in 
these few weeks, in order that we may think 
about things of God and try to realize the depth 
of our own human life. The first thing that we 
ought to understand about it is that when we 
turn aside from life it is only that we go deeper 
into life. This hour does not stand apart from 
the rest of the hours of the week, in that we are 
dealing with things in which the rest of the week 



9 o 



ADDRESSES. 



has no concern. He who understands life deeply 
and fully, understands life truly ; he has forever 
renewed his life ; and if there comes into our 
hearts, in the life which we are living, a perpet- 
ual sense that life needs renewal, a richening and 
refreshing, then it is in order that we may go 
down into the depths and see what lies at the 
root of things — things that we are perpetually 
doing and thinking. It is this that brought us 
together here : it is that we may open to our- 
selves some newer, higher life. It is that we 
may understand the life that we may live, along 
side of and as a richer development of that life 
which we are living from day to day, which we 
have been living during the years of our life. 
How that idea has haunted men in every period 
of their existence, how it is haunting you, that 
there is some higher life which it is possible to 
live ! There has never been a religion that has 
not started there, lifted up its eyes and seen, afar 
oft', what it was possible for man to do from day 
to day, in contrast with the things which men 
immediately and presently are. There is not 
any moment of the human soul which has not 
rested upon some great conception that man was 
a nobler being than he was ordinarily conceiving 
himself to be ; that he was not destined to the 
things which were ordinarily occupying his life ; 
that he might be living a greater and nobler life. 



TRUE LIBERTY. 9 1 

It is because the Christian Scriptures have laid 
most earnestly hold of this idea, it is because it 
was represented not simply in the words which 
Christ said, but in the very being which Christ 
was, that we go to them to get the inspiration 
and the indication, the revelation and the enlight- 
enment which we need. I have read to you these 
few words in which Christ declares the whole 
subject, the whole character of which His life is 
and what His work is about to do, because it 
seems to me that they strike at once the key-note 
of that which we want to understand. They let 
us enter into the full conception of that which 
the new life which is offered to man really is. 
There are two conceptions which come to every 
man when he is entering upon a new life, chan- 
ging his present life to something that is different 
from the present life, and being a different sort of 
creature and living in a different sort of a way. 
The first way in which it presents itself to him 
— almost always at the beginning of every re- 
ligion, perhaps — is in the way of restraint and 
imprisonment. Man thinks of every change that 
is to come to him as in the nature of denial of 
something that he is at the present doing and 
being, as the laying hold upon himself of some 
sort of restraint, bringing to him something 
which says : " I must not do the thing which I 
am doing. I must lay upon myself restraints, 



Q2 ADDRESSES. 

restrictions, commandments, and prohibitions. 
I must not let myself be the man that I am. 11 
You see how the Old Testament comes before 
the New Testament, the law ringing from the 
mountain top with the great denials, the great 
prohibitions, that come from the mouth of God. 
"Thou shalt not do this, that, or the other — 
Thou shalt not murder. Thou shalt not steal. 
Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not 
covet thy neighbor's goods. 1 ' That is the first 
conception which comes to a man of the way in 
which he is to enter upon a new life, of the way 
in which the denial in his experience is to take 
effect. It is as if the hands were stretched out 
in order that fetters might be placed upon them. 
The man says, " Let some power come that is to 
hinder me from being this thing that I am." 
And the whole notion is the notion of imprison- 
ment, restraint, So it is with all civilization. 
It is perfectly possible for us to represent civili- 
zation as compared with barbarism, as accepted 
by mankind, as a great mass of restrictions and 
prohibitions that have been laid upon human 
life, so that the freedom of life has been cast 
aside, and man has entered into restricted, re- 
strained, and imprisoned condition. So it is 
with every fulfilment of life. It is possible for 
a man always to represent it to himself as if it 
were the restriction, restraint, and prohibition of 



TRUE LIBERTY. 93 

his life. The man passes onward into the fuller 
life which belongs to a man. He merges his 
selfishness into that richer life which is offered 
to human kind. He makes himself, instead of a 
single, selfish man, a man of family ; and it is 
easy enough to consider that marriage and the 
family life bring immediately restraints and pro- 
hibitions. The man may not have the free- 
dom which he used to have. So all development 
of education, in the first place, offers itself to 
man, or seems to offer itself to man, as prohibi- 
tion and imprisonment and restraint. There 
is no doubt truth in such an idea. We never 
lose sight of it. No other richer and fuller idea 
which we come to by and by ever does away with 
the thought that man's advance means prohibi- 
tion and self-denial, that in order that man shall 
become the greater thing he must cease to be the 
poorer and smaller thing he has been. But yet 
there is immediately a greater and fuller. When 
we hear those words of Jesus, we see immediately 
that not the idea of imprisonment but the idea 
of liberty, not the idea of restraint but that of 
setting free, is the idea which is really in His 
mind when he offers the fullest life to human 
kind. Have you often thought of how the whole 
Bible is a Book of Liberty, of how it rings with 
liberty from beginning to end, of how the great 
men are the men of liberty, of how the Old 



94 



ADDRESSES. 



Testament, the great picture which forever 
shines, is the emancipator, leading forth out of 
imprisonment the people of God, who were to do 
the great work of God in the very much larger 
and freer life in which they were to live? The 
prophet, the psalmist, are ever preaching and 
singing about liberty, the enfranchisement of 
the life of man, that man was not imprisoned in 
order to fulfil himself, but shall open his life, 
and every new progress shall be into a new 
region of existence which he has not touched as 
yet. When we turn from the Old Testament to 
the New Testament, how absolutely clear that 
idea is ! Christ is the very embodiment of 
human liberty. In His own personal life and 
in everything that He did and said, He was for- 
ever uttering the great gospel that man, in order 
to become his completest, must become his freest, 
that what a man did when he entered into a new 
life was to open a new region in which new 
powers were to find their exercise, in which he 
was to be able to be and do things which he could 
not be and do in more restricted life. It is the 
acceptance of that idea, it seems to me, that 
makes us true disciples of Christ and of that 
great gospel, and that transfigures everything. 
When my friend turns over some new leaf, as we 
say, and begins to live a new life, what shall we 
think of him? I learn that he has become a 



TRUE LIBERTY. 95 

Christian man, that he is doing something, that 
he is working in a way and living a life which 
I have not known before. What is my impres- 
sion in regard to him? Is not your impression, 
as you look upon that man, that somehow or 
other he has entered into a slavery or bondage, 
that he has taken upon his life restrictions and 
imprisonments which he did not have before ? 
And you think of him, perhaps, as a man who 
has done a wise and prudent thing, who has done 
something that is going to be for his benefit 
some day in some distant and half-realized world, 
but as a man who, for the present, has laid a 
burden and bondage upon his life. That is 
never the tone of Christ ; it is never the tone of 
the Christian gospel. When a man turns away 
from his sins and enters into energetic holiness, 
when a man sacrifices his own self-indulgence and 
goes forth a pure servant of his God and his fel- 
low-men, there is only one cry in the whole gos- 
pel of that man, and that is the cry of freedom. 
As soon as he can catch that, as soon as I can 
feel about my friend, who has become a better 
man, that he has become a larger and not a 
smaller, a freer and not a more imprisoned man, 
as soon as I lift up my voice and say that the 
man is free, then I understand him more fully, 
and he becomes a revelation to me in the higher 
and richer life which is possible for me to live. 



g6 ADDRESSES. 

But think of it for yourselves, for a moment, and 
ask what freer life really is. Try to give a defi- 
nition of liberty, and I know not what it can be 
said to be except something of this kind : Liberty 
is the fullest opportunity for man to be and do 
the very best that is possible for him. I know 
of no definition of liberty, that oldest and dearest 
phrase of men, and sometimes the vaguest also, 
except that. It has been perverted, it has been 
distorted and mystified, but that is what it really 
means : the fullest opportunity for a man to do 
and be the very best that is in his personal 
nature to do and to be. It immediately follows 
that everything which is necessary for the full 
realization of a man's life, even though it seems 
to have the character of restraint for a moment, 
is really a part of the process of his enfranchise- 
ment, is the bringing forth of him to a fuller 
liberty. You see a man coming forward and 
offering himself as one of the defenders of his 
country in his country's need. You see him 
standing at the door where men are being re- 
ceived as recruits into the army of the coun- 
try. He wants liberty. He wants to be able 
to do that which he cannot do in his poor, per- 
sonal isolation here at home. He wants the 
badge which will give him the right to go forth 
and meet the enemies of his country, and he 
enrolls himself among these men. He makes 



TRLE LIBERTY. g? 

himself subject to obligations, duties, and drill. 
They are a part of his enfranchisement. They 
are really the breaking of the fetters upon his 
slavery, the sending him forth into freedom. 
He is like a bit of iron or steel that lies upon 
the ground. It lies neglected and perfectly free. 
You see it is made by the adjustment of the end 
of it so that it can be set into a great machine 
and become part of a great working system. But 
there it lies. Will you call it free? It is bound 
to be nothing there. It is absolutely separate, 
and with its own personality distinct and indi- 
vidual and all alone. What is to make that bit 
of iron a free bit of iron, to let it go forth and do 
the thing which it was meant to do, but the tak- 
ing of it and the binding of it at both ends into 
the structure of which it was made to be a part ? 
It seems to me the binding of a man, — it seems to 
me that the binding of the iron is not the yield- 
ing of its freedom. It is not merely after finding 
its place within the system that it first achieves 
its freedom and so joins in the music and par- 
takes of the courses with which the whole en- 
ginery is filled. Is not it, then, for the first time 
a free bit of iron, having accomplished all that 
it was made to do when it came forth from the 
forge of the master, who had this purpose in his 
mind? This, then, is freedom; everything is 
part of the enfranchisement of a man which 



98 ADDRESSES. 

helps to put him in the place where he can live 
his best. Therefore every duty, every will of 
God, every commandment of Christ, every self- 
surrender that a man is called upon to obey or 
to make — do not think of it as if it were simply 
a restraint to liberty, but think of it as the very 
means of freedom, by which we realize the very 
purpose of God and the fulfilment of our life. 
It is interesting to see how all that is true in 
regard to the matter of belief, doctrine, and opin- 
ions which we are apt to accept. How strange it 
very often seems that men go to the Church, or to 
one another, and say : " Must I believe this doc- 
trine in order that I can enter into the Church? " 
" Must I believe this doctrine in order that I may 
be saved? " men say, with a strange sort of notion 
about what salvation is. How strange it seems, 
when we really have got our intelligence about 
us and know what it is to believe ! To believe 
a new truth, if it be really truth and we really 
believe it, is to have entered into a new region, 
in which our life shall find a new expansion and 
a new youth. Therefore, not " Must we believe ? M 
but "May I believe?" is the true cry of the 
human creature who is seeking for the richest 
fulfilment of his life, who is working that his 
whole nature may find its complete expansion 
and so its completest exercise. We talk a great 
deal in these days and in this place about a 



TRUE LIBERTY. 99 

liberal faith. What is aliberal faith, my friends? 
It seems to me that by every true meaning of 
the word, by every true thought of the idea, a 
liberal faith is a faith that believes much, and 
not a faith that believes little. The more a man 
believes, the more liberally he exercises his 
capacity of faith, the more he sends forth his 
intelligence into the mysteries of God, the more 
he understands those things which God chooses 
to reveal to his creatures, the more liberally he 
believes. Let yourselves never think that you 
grow liberal in faith by believing less ; always be 
sure that the true liberality of faith can only 
come by believing more. It is true, indeed, that 
as soon as a man becomes eager for belief, for the 
truth of God and for the mysteries with which 
God's universe is filled, he becomes all the more 
critical and careful. He will not any longer, if 
he were before, be simply greedy of things to 
believe, so that if any superstition comes offer- 
ing itself to him he will not gather it in indis- 
criminately and believe it without evidence, 
without examination. He becomes all the more 
critical and careful, the more he becomes assured 
that belief, and not unbelief, is the true condition 
of his life. The truth that God has entered into 
this world in wondrous ways and filled its life 
with Jesus Christ, the truth that man has a soul 
and not simply a body, that he has a spiritual 



IOO ADDRESSES. 

need, that God cares for him and he is to care 
for himself, that there is an immortal life, and 
that that which we call faith is but the opening 
of a gate, the pushing back of a veil, — shall a 
man believe those things as imprisonments of his 
nature, and shall it not make him larger? Shall 
it not be the indulgence of his life when he enters 
into the great certainties which so are offered to 
his belief, believing them in his own way? Let 
us always feel that to accept a new belief is not to 
build a wall beyond which we cannot pass, but is 
to open the door to a great fresh, free region, in 
which our souls are to live. And just so it is when 
we come to the moral things of life. The man puts 
aside some sinfulness. He breaks down the wall 
that has been shutting his soul out of its highest 
life. He has been a drunkard, and he becomes a 
sober man. He has been a cheat, and becomes 
a faithful man. He has been a liar, and becomes 
a truthful man. He has been a profligate, and 
he becomes a pure man. What has happened to 
that man? Shall he simply think of himself as 
one who has crushed this passion, shut down 
this part of his life ? Shall he simply think of 
himself as one who has taken a course of self- 
denial ? Nay. It is self-indulgence that a man 
has really entered upon. It is an indulgence of 
the deepest part of his own nature, not of his 
unreal nature. He has risen and shaken himself 



TRUE LIBERTY. 10 1 

like a lion, so that the dust has fallen from his 
mane, and all the great range of that life which 
God gave him to live lies before him. This is 
the everlasting inspiration. This is the illumi- 
nation. I don't wonder that men refuse to give 
up evil if it simply seems to them to be giving 
up the evil way, and no vision opens before them 
of the thing that they may be and do. I don't 
wonder that, if the negative, restricting, impris- 
oning conception of the new life is all that a man 
gets hold of, he lingers again and again in the 
old life. But just as soon as the great world 
opens before him then it is like a prisoner going 
out of the prison door. Is there no lingering? 
Does not the baser part of him cling to the old 
prison, to the ease and the provision for him, 
to the absence of anxiety and of energy? I 
think there can hardly be a prisoner who, with 
any leap of heart, goes out of the prison door, 
when his term is finished, and does not even look 
into that black horror where he has been living, 
cast some lingering, longing look behind. He 
comes to the exigencies, to the demands of life, 
to the necessity of making himself once more a 
true man among his fellow-men. But does he 
stop? He comes forth, and if there be the soul 
of a man in him still, he enters into the new life 
with enthusiasm, and finds the new powers 
springing in him to their work. And if it be 



I 2 ADDRESSES. 

so with every special duty, then with that great 
thing which you and I are called upon to do — 
the total acceptance by our nature of the will of 
God the total acceptance by our nature of the 
mastery of Jesus Christ. Oh ! how this world 
has perverted words and meanings, that the 
mastery of Jesus Christ should seem to be the 
imprisonment and not the enfranchisement of 
the soul ! When 1 bring a flower out of the 
darkness and set it in the sun, and let the sun- 
light come streaming down upon it, and the 
flower knows the sunlight for which it was made 
and opens its fragrance and beauty ; when I take 
a dark pebble and put it into the stream and let 
the silver water go coursing down over it and 
bringing forth the hidden color that was in the 
bit o & f stone, opening the nature that is in them, 
the flower and stone rejoice. I can almost hear 
them sing in the field and in the stream. What 
then ? Shall not man bring his nature out into 
the fullest illumination, and surprise himself by 
the things that he might do ? Oh! the littleness 
of the lives that we are living ! Oh ! the way in 
which we fail to comprehend, or when we do 
comprehend, deny to ourselves the bigness of 
that thing which it is to be a man, to be a child 
of God ! Sometimes it dawns upon us that we 
can see it opening into the vision of these men 
and women in the New Testament. Sometimes 



TRUE LIBERTY. IO3 

there opens to us the picture of this thing that 
we might be, and then there are truly the trial 
moments of our life. Then we lift up ourselves 
and claim our liberty or, dastardly or cowardly, 
slink back into the sluggish imprisonment in 
which we have been living. How does all this 
affect that which we are continually conscious 
of, urging upon ourselves and upon one another? 
How does it affect the whole question of a man's 
sins? Oh! these sins, the things we know so 
well ! As we sit here and stand here one entire 
hour, as we talk in this sort of way, everybody 
knows the weaknesses of his own nature, the sins 
of his own soul. Don't you know it? What 
shall we think about those sins ? It seems to me, 
my friends, that all this great picture of the 
liberty into which Christ sets man, in the first 
place does one thing which we are longing to see 
done in the world. It takes away the glamour 
and the splendor from sin. It breaks that spell 
by which men think that the evil thing is the 
glorious thing. If the evil thing be that which 
Christ has told us that the evil thing is — which 
I have no time to tell you now — if every sin 
that you do is not simply a stain upon your soul, 
but is keeping you out from some great and 
splendid thing which you might do, then is 
there any sort of splendor and glory about sin? 
How about the sins that you did when you were 



I0 4 ADDRESSES. 

young men ? How can you look back upon those 
sins and think what your life might have been 
if it had been pure from the beginning, think 
what vou might have been if from the very 
beginning vou had caught sight of what it was 
to be a man? And then your boy comes along. 
What are the men in this town doing largely in 
many and many a house, but letting their boys 
believe that the sins of their early life are glori- 
ous things, except that those things which they 
did the base and wretched things that they were 
doing when they were fifteen and twenty and 
twenty-five and thirty years old, are the true 
career of a human nature, are the true entrance 
into human life ? The miserable talk about sow- 
ing wild oats, about getting through the neces- 
sary conditions of life before a man comes to 
solemnity ! Shame upon any man who, having 
passed through the sinful conditions and habits 
and dispositions of his earlier life, has not car- 
ried out of them an absolute shame for them 
that shall let him say to his boy, by word and 
by every utterance of his life within the house 
where he and the boy live together, -Refrain 
for they are abominable things ! " To get rid ot 
the glamour of sin, to get rid of the idea that it 
is a glorious thing to be dissipated instead of 
being concentrated to duty, to get rid of the idea 
that to be drunken and to be lustful are true and 



TRUE LIBERTY. 105 

noble expressions of our abounding human life, 
to get rid of any idea that sin is aught but 
imprisonment, is to make those who come after 
us, and to make ourselves in what of life is left 
for us, gloriously ambitious for the freedom of 
purity, for a full entrance into that life over 
which sin has no dominion. And yet, at the 
same time, don't you see that while sin thus 
becomes contemptible when we think about the 
great illustration of the will of God and Jesus 
Christ, don't you see how also it puts on a new 
horror? That which I thought I was doing in 
the halls of my imprisonment I have really been 
doing within the possible world of God in which 
I might have been free. The moment I see what 
life might have been to me, then any sin becomes 
dreadful to me. Have you ever thought of how 
the world has stood in glory and honor before 
the sinless humanity of Jesus Christ? If any 
life could prove, if any argument could show on 
investigation to-day that Jesus did one sin in all 
his life,* that the perfect liberty which was his 
perfect purity was not absolutely perfect, do you 
realize what a horror would seem to fall down 
from the heavens, what a constraint and burden 
would be laid upon the lives of men, how the 
gates of men's possibilities would seem to close 
in upon them? It is because there has been that 
one life which, because absolutely pure from sin, 



106 ADDRESSES. 

was absolutely free ; it is because man may look 
up and see in that life the revelation and possi- 
bility of his own ; it is because that life, echoing 
the great cry throughout the world that man every- 
where is the son of God, offers the same purity — 
and so the same freedom — to all mankind ; 
it is for that reason that a man rejoices to cling 
to, to believe in, however impure his life is, the 
perfect purity, the sinlessnessof the life of Jesus. 
When you sin, my friends, it is a man that sins, 
and a man is a child of God ; and for a child of 
God to sin is an awful thing, not simply for the 
stain that he brings into the divine nature that 
is in him, but for the life from which it shuts 
him out, for the liberty which he abandons, for 
the inthrallment which it lays upon the soul. 
There is one thing that people say very care- 
lessly that always seems to me to be a dreadful 
thing for a man to say. They say it when they 
talk about their lives to one another, and think 
about their lives to themselves, and by and by 
very often say it upon their death-bed with the 
last gasp, as though their entrance into the eter- 
nal world had brought them no deeper enlighten- 
ment. One wonders what is the revelation that 
comes to them when they stand upon the borders 
of the other side and are in the full life and 
eternity of God. The thing men say is, "I have 
done the very best I can." It is an awful thing 



TRUE LIBERTY. \0J 

for a man to say. The man never lived, save he 
who perfected our humanity, who ever did the 
very best he could. You dishonor your life, you 
not simply shut your eyes to certain facts, you 
not simply say an infinitely absurd and foolish 
thing, but you dishonor your human life if you 
say that you have done in any day of your life 
or in all the days of your life put together, the 
very best that you could, or been the very best 
man that you could be. You! what are you? 
Again I say, The child of God, and this which 
you have been, what is it? Look over it, see 
how selfish it has been, see how material it has 
been, how it has lived in the depths when it 
might have lived on the heights, see how it has 
lived in the little narrow range of selfishness 
when it might have been as broad as all human- 
ity, nay, when it might have been as the God of 
humanity. Don't dare to say that in any day 
of your life, or in all your life together, you have 
done the best that you could. The Pharisee 
said it when he went up into the temple, and all 
the world has looked on with mingled pity and 
scorn at the blindness of the man who stood 
there and paraded his faithfulness ; while all the 
world has bent with a pity that was near to love, 
a pity that was full of sympathy because man 
recognized his condition and experience, for the 
poor creature grovelling upon the pavement, un- 



I0 8 ADDRESSES. 

willing and unable even to look upon the altar, 
but who, standing afar off, said, " God be mer- 
ciful to me a sinner ! " Whatever else you say, 
don't say, " I have been the very best I could. 11 
That means that you have not merely lived in 
the rooms of your imprisonment, but that you 
have been satisfied to count them the only pos- 
sible rooms of your life, and that the great halls 
of your liberty have never opened themselves 
before you. Shall not they open themselves 
somehow to us to-day, my friends? Shall we 
not turn away from this hour and go back into 
our business, into our offices, into the shops, 
into the crowded streets, bearing new thoughts 
of the lives that we might live, feeling the fetters 
on our hands and feet, feeling many things as 
fetters which we have thought of as the ornament 
and glory of our life, determined to be unsatis- 
fied forever until these fetters shall be stricken 
off and we have entered into the full liberty which 
comes to those alone who are dedicated to the 
service of God, to the completion of their own 
nature, to the acceptance of the grace of Christ, 
and to the attainment of the eternal glory of the 
spiritual life, first here and then hereafter, never 
hereafter, it may be, except here and now, cer- 
tainly here and now, as the immediate, pressing 
privilege and duty of our lives ? So let us stand 
up on our feet and know ourselves in all the 



TRUE LIBERTY. 109 

richness and in all the awfulness of our human 
life. Let us know ourselves children of God, 
and claim the liberty which God has given to 
every one of his children who will take it. God 
bless you and give some of you, help some of us, 
to claim, as we have never claimed before, that 
freedom with which the Son makes free ! 



THE CHRIST IN WHOM CHRIS- 
TIANS BELIEVE. 



I want to read to you again the words of Jesus 
in the eighth chapter of the Gospel of St. John : 
" Then said Jesus to those Jews which believed 
on Him, If ye continue in my word, then are ye 
my disciples indeed; and ye shall know the 
truth, and the truth shall make you free. They 
answered him, We be Abraham's seed, and were 
never in bondage to any man : how sayest thou, 
Ye shall be made free? Jesus answered them, 
Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whosoever com- 
mitteth sin 'is the servant of sin. And the 
servant abideth not in the house for ever : but 
the Son abideth ever. If the Son therefore 
shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed. 11 
The service of God is not self-restraint, but 
self-indulgence. That is the first truth of 
all religion. That is the truth which we 
found uttered in those words of Jesus when we 
were thinking of them the other day. That is 



THE CHRIST. Ill 

the truth to which we return as we come back 
again to think of those words and all that they 
mean and all that the speaker of them means to 
us and to our lives. When we remember that 
truth, when we recognize that no man is ever 
to be saved except by the fulfilment of his own 
nature, and not by the restraint of his nature, 
when we recognize that no man, no personal, 
individual man, is ever to be ransomed from his 
sins except by having opened to him a larger and 
fuller life into which he has entered, we seem to 
have displayed to us a large region, into which 
we are tempted to enter, and which is so rich 
and inviting to us that we immediately begin to 
ask ourselves if it is possible that there should 
be such a region. It is simply a great dream 
that we set before us. It is something that we 
imagine, something that comes out of the imagi- 
nations and anticipations of our own hearts, 
simply stimulated by the possibilities of the life 
in which we are living. It would be very much 
indeed, if it were only that. It would bear a 
certain testimony of itself, if it simply came out 
of the perpetual dissatisfaction of men's souls, 
even if there were no distinct manifestation of 
that life and no possibility of entering into it at 
once with our own personal consecration, with 
the resolution of our own wills. But if it were 
simply a dream, ultimately it must fade away 



1 1 2 ADDRESSES. 

out of the thoughts of men. It is impossible 
that men should keep on, year after year, age 
after age, this simple dream of something which 
does not exist. It would be like those pictures 
which the poet has drawn, something which 
appeals to nothing in our human nature and 
stands only as a parable of something that is a 
great deal lower than itself. The poet pictures 
to us in his imagination those things which do 
not appeal to our life, because they find nothing 
to correspond to their high portraits, to show 
those transformations of nature into something 
that is entirely different and foreign to itself. 
If religion be simply the dream that some men 
hold it to be, if it simply be the cheating of 
man's soul with that which has no reality to 
correspond to it, then it will be no more than 
this. Is there any assurance that is given to us, 
that is before the soul of man, of some great new 
life which it is given for man to seek, without 
which it is given for no man to be satisfied? I 
do not know where any man could find that 
assurance absolutely and entirely, unless there 
had stood forth before us the person of Him who 
spoke these words and who manifested them in 
His life. And therefore it is that, having pic- 
tured to you the richness of the life which is 
open to every man, his own true life, the large 
freedom into which he may go if, giving up his 



THE CHRIST 113 

sins he enters into the fulness of the life of God, 
I cannot help now calling you to think about 
Him who gives, not merely by His words, but 
by the whole of His own person and life, that 
manifestation of the reality of the divine exist- 
ence and tempts us to follow after Him. In 
other words, we come to-day to think of Christ, 
Christ who claims to be the master of the world, 
Christ from whom the revelation of that higher 
life has come, not in its first instance in the 
manifestation of the words which he spoke, for it 
had been the dream of human hearts through all 
the ages, but who made it so distinct and clear 
that ever since the time of Christ men have been 
able to cease to seek after it, men have never 
been able to give up the hope and dream that it 
was there. It is our Christ in whom we Chris- 
tians believe. It is the Christ in whom a great 
many of you listening to me now claim to believe 
— I do myself — in whom many of you do be- 
lieve, whom many of you have followed into that 
newer life. I would to God that I could so set 
Him before you to-day, could so make you feel 
his actual presence in the life which we are liv- 
ing, which we may be living, that there should 
be no question in any man of the power that is 
open before him to enter into the higher life and 
to fulfil his soul to God. What I want to do, in 
the few moments which I may speak to you this 



I 1 4 ADDRESSES. 

morning, is — laying aside all the theological con- 
ceptions regarding Him, laying aside everything 
that attaches to the complications and mysteries 
in which His nature has been involved in men's 
dreams of Him, laying aside everything which 
the churches are holding as the special doctrine 
of their especial creed — to go back to the very 
beginning and see if we can understand anything 
of what it is — this personal Christ, who lives 
here in the world and manifests the power of 
God and opens the possibility of every man. 
Surely it is good that we should know something 
about Him of whom we speak so much, that there 
should be some clear and directest conception of 
one whose name has been upon the lips of men 
for eighteen hundred years ; and it is possible 
for us, in the simplest way, to understand how 
His power has come into the world and to see 
where it is possible that it should come and 
enrich our lives and make us different men. We 
go back, then, to the very beginning of the aspi- 
ration after God, which is in the heart of man 
everywhere. There has never been a race that 
has been without it. There has never been a 
generation that has not reached forward and 
thought there was a higher life, a fuller liberty, 
to which it could come. It has been in all the 
religions which have been not simply fears, but 
which have been the highest utterances of all the 



THE CHRIST. I I 5 

different races in all the different generations of 
mankind and all the different countries of the 
world ; and there was one especial race in one 
especial part of the world in whom that aspira- 
tion was especially strong. We will not ask how 
it came to be there. There it was in this strange 
people living on the eastern shore of the Medi- 
terranean Sea, and in all its history marked out 
by the strange peculiarity that it was a spiritual 
people, that in the midst of all its sins, blunders, 
and weaknesses it was forever lifting up its soul 
to God and striving to find Him out. Very often 
it blundered strangely and sadly. Very often it 
failed to get that for which it was seeking, by the 
very impetuousness, rashness, and earnestness of 
search. But it was always seeking after Him. 
And the years rolled by, and by and by in the 
midst of that great nation there was a little com- 
pany of men who, accompanying one another 
from the beginning of their lives, had been 
searching after this God and trying everywhere 
if they could find Him. And one day they heard 
that down by the river which ran through their 
country, which was sacred to them from the 
multitude of old national associations, there was 
a great teacher come, who was declaring that for 
which the human soul was forever reaching after, 
the need of escaping from sin and entering upon 
and leading a higher life. This little company 



Il6 ADDRESSES. 

went down and met two disciples of John the 
Baptist, and learned from them everything that 
they had to teach them. Their souls were stirred 
by that which he had to say. But one day, 
while he was teaching them, it seemed as if they 
had come to an end of that which he could teach 
them. He looked up, and there upon the hill 
just above the river there was passing one upon 
whom the gaze of the fishermen by the river 
immediately kindled, and he lifted his hand and 
said, " He is the one who is to teach you now. 
You must go after him. Behold the Lamb of 
God, which taketh away the sin of the world." 
Great and mysterious words, that filled in that 
which men had believed in all the records they 
had read and the thinking they had done before ! 
And they turned away from John and went after 
this new teacher and, following to His house, 
there they abode with Him during that day and 
the days that followed after. Little by little, as 
we read the story of their being with him, we 
can see them taken into His power, we can see 
how there was a certain fascination in His pres- 
ence which laid hold upon them. It seemed at 
first to be purely human, to be the way in which 
one strong man takes possession of his fellow- 
man and compels him to rely upon him. It was 
upon purely human ground. It was in the mani- 
festation of the excellence of this human nature 



THE CHRIST. I 1 7 

of ours that they believed in Jesus and gradually 
became His disciples. Little by little it so com- 
manded them that at last the moment came when 
it was impossible for them to separate themselves 
from Him ; and one day, when the people were 
turning away from Him when He was preaching 
and saying things that it was hard for them to 
understand, He looked around upon them and 
said, "Are you going also, will you leave me 
now ? " And then there burst forth from the lips 
of one of them, the most strong and characteristic 
act of the little company, those great words that 
declared how He had become necessary to them : 
"Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the 
words of eternal life. 11 You see the power that 
Jesus had acquired over these men. You see 
the way in which He had taken them absolutely 
into His dominion, simply because of the mani- 
festation of character and life, simply because He 
had shown them what man might be and opened 
the springs of the better life in themselves by 
the words He had spoken to them. And then 
they lived on with Him still, and by and by they 
had become so convinced by His truth and wis- 
dom, His character had so taken possession of 
them, that they were ready to believe anything 
that He said. One day He lifted up His voice 
and declared that which had gradually been 
dawning upon them all the time, that He was 



Il8 ADDRESSES. 

more than they were, that He had brought in 
some mysterious way a divine life into this world 
and had much to communicate to them. He told 
them that He was the Father from whom His 
life and their life had come. He told them that 
He and the Father were one. He told them, not 
in theological statement, not as men have worked 
out since in their desire to know it fully, but in 
the simple statement of the truth that could be 
the inspiration of their life, that in His presence 
there was here the very presence of God among 
them. It was not strange to them, though human 
creatures, though men, that the highest aspira- 
tion of their humanity had never thought God 
so far from this world that it seemed to them 
strange that there should be in very human 
presence the divine life here with them. They 
could not explain it and did not try to explain it. 
Here it was, that which they had seen shadowed 
in the divinest men whom they had known, that 
which they had recognized. Here it was before 
them in this being who had won such a power 
over them that they were ready to accept His tes- 
timony with regard to Himself. Oh ! my friends, 
let us not feel that the evidence of our Christian 
faith fails when it is seen to rest upon the word 
of Christ Himself. My neighbor knows more 
of himself than I know of him. I know more of 
myself than any man can know of me, if only I 



THE CHRIST. 1 1 9 

be earnest and sincere. And that the greatest 
of men who ever trod this earth should not know 
more of His nature than any other man should 
know, and that therefore His word should not be 
the richest revelation of that which is in His life 
and makes His power over mankind, that is in- 
credible. Therefore the men were right when 
they believed Jesus 1 own word and looked to 
Him for the divinity which He said was present 
with Him upon the earth. Then His life went 
on, and by and by fulfilled itself in the one great 
action in which He declared those two things 
which He longed to know, the life and newness 
of God and the power of their human nature. 
He gave His life for them, indeed, in the awful 
suffering that preceded and that culminated 
upon the cross. He gave His life in crucifixion 
for them, and in that crucifixion opened the 
divinest doors of His life, when opening a sanc- 
tuary of sorrow ; and He bade them enter in and 
know there the absolute life of God and the great 
capacity of human nature to sacrifice itself for 
God. And before He died, and afterward, He 
again appeared to them. He spoke great words 
which said that this was not the end of things, 
that after they had ceased to see Him and touch 
Him and hear His voice He still was to be present 
in the world. He said that the mysterious pres- 
ence of those who had passed away, which all had 



120 ADDRESSES. 

known, was to culminate and be fulfilled in Him. 
" I am with you alway, even unto the end of the 
world. 1 ' Wherever you "are together in my 
name, there am I." Words and words and words 
again like those He spoke, in which He declared 
that He was to be an everlasting presence among 
mankind, and therefore that which had taken 
place in the life of those disciples might forever 
take place : that that which Jesus had done in 
the days when He was present upon the earth 
should be continually repeated, in that He was 
forever to do that which He had been doing, giv- 
ing Himself to human kind for their inspiration, 
for their elevation, for their correction, for their 
reproof, as He had been doing, their salvation, 
as He had been doing in those days in which 
He was here among them. Men have believed 
that simply. They have recognized that word of 
Christ, and found the fulfilment of it in their 
own lives ; and that has been the Christian re- 
ligion, — just exactly what it was in the old days 
when Jesus was present in Jerusalem and Gali' 
lee. Just exactly what men did then men have 
been doing in all the generations that have come 
since. Just exactly what was possible then is 
possible for them now — that we may become the 
followers of that same Christ and the receivers 
through Him of the divine life, by which alone 
the human life is perfected and fulfilled. 



THE CHRIST. 121 

That is the Christian religion. That is the 
Christian faith. Is it not clear and simple, 
whether it be true or not? My friends, you may 
believe it or you may disbelieve it, but the Chris- 
tian faith is clear and simple enough surely in 
this statement, stripped of a thousand difficulties, 
perplexities, and bewilderments. That is it, that 
there is in the world to-day the same Christ who 
was in the world eighteen hundred and more 
years ago, and that men may go to Him and re- 
ceive His life and the inspiration of His pres- 
ence and the guidance of His wisdom just ex- 
actly as they did then. If you and I had been 
in Jerusalem in those old days, what would we 
have done, if we were more than mere creatures 
of others, more than men merely absorbed in 
our business, if there were any stirring in our 
souls after the deeper and diviner desires, could 
we, would we have been satisfied until we had 
gone wherever He might be, — in the temple, in 
the courts, or on the country road, — and found 
that Jesus, and entered into some sympathy with 
His life, that He might give to us what revelation 
of life and what guidance of will it might be pos- 
sible should come from Him to men who trusted 
Him, until we had entered into sympathy with 
Him and the fascinations of His character? 
That is the Christian life, my friends, the thing 
we make so vague and mysterious and difficult. 



122 ADDRESSES. 

That is the Christian life, the following of Jesus 
Christ. 

What is the Christian? Everywhere the man l/ 
who, so far as he comprehends Jesus Christ, so 
far as he can get any knowledge of Him, is His 
servant, the man who makes Christ a teacher of 
his intelligence and the guide of his soul, the 
man who obeys Christ as far as he has been able 
to understand Him. What, you say, the man ^ 
who imperfectly understands Christ, who don't 
know anything about His divinity, who denies 
the great doctrines of the Church in regard to 
Him, is he a Christian? Certainly he is, my 
friends. There is no other test than this, the 
following of Jesus Christ. So far as any soul 
deeply consecrated to Him, and wanting the in- 
fluence that it feels that He has to give, follows 
Christ, enters into His obedience and His com- 
pany, and receives His blessings, just so far He 
is able to bestow it. I cannot sympathize with ^/ 
any feeling that desires to make the name of 
Christian a narrower name. I would spread it 
just as wide as it can be possibly made to spread. 
I would know any man as a Christian, rejoice 
to know any man as a Christian, whom Jesus 
would recognize as a Christian, and Jesus Christ, 
I am sure, in those old days recognized His fol- )/ 
lowers even if they came after Him wi{h the 
blindest sight, with the most imperfect recogni- 



THE CHRIST. 1 23 

tion and acknowledgment of what He was and 
of what He could do. 

And then, again, is it not very strange, cer- 
tainly, that there should be, in these later days, 
in all these centuries that have passed between 
the day of Jesus Christ and us, that there should 
have come a vast accumulation of speculation 
and conjecture, of theorizing and thought with 
regard to Christ and what He was, and that a 
great deal of it should have been very strange and 
should seem to us to-day to have been very silly, 
a great part of it should have seemed to be but a 
work of intelligences that were half dulled and 
blinded, full of prejudice, and shrinking from 
the error and the danger in which they stood ? 
What does it mean — all these complicated the- 
ologies that we say are keeping us away from the 
simple following of the grandest figure that has 
ever presented Himself before human kind ? I 
know not how else it can be when I see what has 
been the power of Jesus over thoughts and homes 
and hearts of men through all these years. It 
seems to be a previous necessity that He who most 
fastens the heart and life of man, who seems to 
be most necessary to the soul of men, shall so 
attract their thought, shall so draw them all to 
Himself that their crudest speculations, that their 
most erroneous conceptions, shall fasten upon 
him, and they shall be in some true way a testi- 



124 ADDRESSES. 

mony of the way in which He has always held 
the human heart. This is the way in which all 
crudities of theology, all the weaknesses of specu- 
lation, all even of the most strange and foul 
thoughts in regard to the life of Jesus and His 
manifestation in the world, have accumulated 
around that gracious figure, so simple and strong, 
which walks through our human life and mani- 
fests to us the God. Surely it is in one concep- 
tion of it, and the true conception of it, the great 
perpetual testimony of how men have cared about 
Jesus, that they have speculated about Him in 
such strange perplexing ways. But He about 
whom the world does not care walks through 
the world and bears His simple being. There is 
nothing that fastens upon Him, that perplexes 
His life, that makes mysterious and strange the 
life He lives. But where is the great man in all 
the history of human kind that has not gathered 
about his person and work the speculations of 
those whom we find, with their crude and un- 
guided minds, have formed their theories in 
regard to Him? It is the very abundance of the 
strange speculations with regard to Christ, it is 
the very strangeness of the theories that have 
been formed with regard to Him, that has shown 
me how He has drawn the hearts of men, how He 
has not let them go, but compelled them to fasten 
themselves to Him, to think about Him and try 



THE CHRIST. 1 25 

to follow Him in such poor, blind ways as they 
were able to give themselves to Him in. This, 
then, is the Christian faith. This is the way in 
which the larger life opens before mankind, by 
the following of a person, by the giving of the 
life into the dominion and the guidance and the 
obedience of one who goes forward into that life, 
himself thoroughly believing in it — for Jesus 
believed in it with all His human soul. 

But then, we ask ourselves, is it possible that 
we can gather from such a life as Jesus lived so 
long ago, a life that was lived back in the very 
dust of history and that has come down to us in 
records which seem sometimes to be flecked with 
tradition and obscured with the distance in which 
they lived, is it possible that I should get from 
him a guidance of my daily life here ? Am I, a 
man of the nineteenth century, when everything 
has changed, in Boston, in this modern civiliza- 
tion, — can Jesus really be my teacher, my guide, 
in the actual duties and perplexities of my daily 
life and lead me into the larger land in which I 
know he lives ? Ah ! the man knows very little 
about the everlasting identity of human nature, 
little of how the world in all these changeless 
ages is the same, who asks that ; very little, 
also, of how in every largest truth there are all 
particulars and details of human life involved ; 
little of how everything that a man is to-day, 



126 ADDRESSES. 

upon every moment, rests upon some eternal 
foundation and may be within the power of 
some everlasting law. The wonder of the life 
of Jesus is this — and you will find it so and 
you have found it so if you have ever taken your 
New Testament and tried to make it the rule of 
your daily life — that there is not a single action 
that you are called upon to do of which you need 
be, of which you will be, in any serious doubt for 
ten minutes as to what Jesus Christ, if He were 
here, Jesus Christ being here, would have you 
do under those circumstances and with the mate- 
rial upon which you are called to act. Men have 
tried to go back and imitate the very activities 
of the life of Jesus Christ, to do the very things 
that He did. Souls have fled across the sea and 
tried upon the hills and in the plains where 
Jesus lived to reproduce the life that has so 
fascinated them. They were poor and unphilo- 
sophic souls. The soul that takes in Jesus' 
word, the soul that through the words of Jesus 
enters into the very person of Jesus, the soul 
that knows Him as its daily presence and its 
daily law — it never hesitates. . Do I doubt — 
I, who see myself called upon to be the slave of 
these conditions which are around me — to do this 
thing? Because it is the custom of the business 
in which I am engaged, do I doubt for a moment 
if I turn aside and open this New Testament, 



THE CHRIST. 1 27 

which is Jesus' law with regard to that thing? I, 
with my passion boiling in my veins, leading me 
to do some foul act of outrageous lust, have I a 
single moment's doubt what Jesus would have 
me do if He were here — what Jesus, being here, 
really wants me to do ? There is no single act 
of your life, my friend, there is no single di- 
lemma in which you find yourself placed, in 
which the answer is not in Jesus Christ. I do 
not say that you will find some words in Jesus' 
teachings in the Gospel of Matthew, Mark, Luke, 
and John that will detail exactly the condition 
in which you find yourself placed ; but I do say 
that if, with your human sympathies and your 
devoted love, you can feel the presence of that 
Jesus behind the words that He said, the personal 
perfectness, the divine life manifested in the 
human life, there is not a single sin or tempta- 
tion to sin that will not be convicted. 

There is where we rest when we claim that 
Jesus Christ is the master of the world, that He 
opens the great richness and infinite distances of 
the human life, that He shows us what it is to be 
men. It would be little if He did that simply 
with the painting of some glorious vision upon 
the skies beyond ; but that He comes into your 
life and mine, into our homes and our shops, 
into our offices and on our streets, and there 
makes known in the actual circumstances of our 



128 ADDRESSES. 

daily life what we ought to do and what we 
ought not to do — that is the wonder of his reve- 
lation ; that is what proclaims him to be the Son 
of God and the Son of man. Think, as you sit 
here, of anything that you are doing that is 
wrong, of any habit of your life, of your self- 
indulgence, or of that great, pervasive habit of 
your life which makes you a creature of the 
present instead of the eternities, a creature of 
the material earth instead of the glorious skies. 
Ask of yourself of any habit that belongs to your 
own personal life, and bring it face to face with 
Jesus Christ and see if it is not judged. A 
judgment day that is far away, that is off in the 
dim distance when this world is done — it shall 
come, no doubt. I know none of us can know 
much with regard to it, except that it is sure. 
But the judgment day that is here now is Christ ; 
the judgment day that is right close to your life 
and rebukes you, if you will let Him rebuke you 
every time you sin, the judgment day that is 
here and praises you and bids you be of good 
courage, when you do a thing that men disown 
and despise, is Christ. Therefore it is no figure 
of speech, it is no mere ecstasy of the imagina- 
tion of the preacher, when we say that in the 
midst of these streets of ours, more real than 
the men that walk in them, more real than the 
sidewalks that are under our feet, and the build- 



THE CHRIST. 1 29 

ings that tower over us, there walks an unseen 
presence. An unseen presence ? Yes. Are you 
and I going to be such creatures of our senses 
that we shall not believe that there are powers 
that touch us that we cannot see ? Am I going 
to be so bound down to these poor fingers and to 
these poor eyes that I shall know myself in no 
larger connection with the great, unseen world ? 
I will not. No great man, no manly man, has 
ever allowed such a limitation of himself. There 
is the unseen presence in the midst of our life, 
and he who will feel it may feel it, and that 
unseen presence speaks to him continually. It 
knows every one of us. It knows the rich man 
and knows what his wealth has made of him. 
It knows whether it has made him selfish. Shall 
I say it ? He, the Christ, the present Christ, 
knows whether the rich man's riches have made 
him selfish and base and mean, covetous and 
poor and little-souled, or whether he has been 
glad to rise to the greatness of his privilege, and 
be the very utterance of the beneficence of God 
upon the earth. He knows the poor man and 
his struggles, he knows the poor man and his 
self-respect. He speaks to the poor man's soul, 
who has been kept poor because he will not enter 
into the baser methods and motives of our mod- 
ern life, and is despised, and says to him, " Be 
of good courage, for I know what you are." He 



1 30 ADDRESSES. 

speaks to the poor in distress and poverty. He 
speaks to the wretched in their disappointment 
and their pain. He is their comforter. He 
knows every sin. He knows every sorrow of 
our life. He goes, unseen on earth, into the 
chambers where the dead lie dead, and where the 
sick lie dying, and He speaks His words of con- 
solation, He opens up the glory of the perfect 
life. He lays his hand upon the mourner whose 
soul is bowed down to the earth and says, " Look 
up," and points into eternity and heaven. All 
these things Christ can do not merely, but Christ 
is doing. He is the inspiring power of this life, 
that keeps it from rotting in its corruption and 
degradation. We dwell too much, I think, upon 
some of these things ; we cannot dwell too much, 
perhaps, but we dwell out of proportion, it may 
be, to the thought of Jesus Christ, the comforter 
of sorrow. He is the comforter of sorrow, for 
he knew and he knows what sorrow is. In His 
own crucifixion, in that which came before His 
crucifixion, He knew the suffering of this earthly 
life. There is no human being who ever has 
known the misery of man as Jesus knows it, and 
so He comes to all sorrows with tender consola- 
tion. God grant, God grant He may come to any 
of you who have come into these doors to-day 
with a sorrow, with a fear, with a dread upon 
your hearts, with souls that are wrung, with 



THE CHRIST 131 

bodies that are suffering ! God grant that the 
Christ may comfort you, may comfort you ! But 
not only that. Shall there be no Christ for those 
who for the moment seem to need no comfort? 

Shall there be no Christ for the strong men 
who have before them the duties of their life, 
and who want the strength with which to do 
them? Shall there be no Christ for the young 
men, the young men standing in danger, but 
also standing in such magnificent and splendid 
chances ? It is great to think of Christ standing 
by the sorrowing and comforting them. It is 
great, — we will not say it is greater, — it is very 
great, when by the side of the young man just 
entering into life there stands the Christ, saying 
to his soul, with the voice that he cannot fail to 
hear : " Be pure, be strong, be wise, be independ- 
ent ; rejoice in Me and My appreciation. Let 
the world go, if it is necessary that the world 
should go. Serve the world, but do not be the 
servant of the world. Make the world your ser- 
vant by helping the world in every way in which 
you can minister to its life. Be brave, be strong, 
be manly by My strength." Oh ! young man, if 
you can hear the Christ speak to you like that 
behind all the traditions of the street, behind 
the teachings of the books, behind all that the 
wise and successful men say to you, behind all 
the cynics and sneerers say to you, the great. 



132 ADDRESSES. 

strong, healthy voice of Jesus Christ, who be- 
lieves in man because He has known man filled 
with divinity, and believes in you because He 
knows that which has been set before you by 
your Father in the sending out of your life, and 
who longs and prays and waits to strengthen 
you, that you may do your work, that you may 
escape from sin, that you may live your life, 
this great figure of the present Christ that 
Christianity can produce — it is not the memory 
of something that is away back in the past, it is 
not the anticipation of something to come in the 
future. We talk about Christ the Saviour, and 
think about Calvary long ago. We talk about 
the Christ the Judge, and think of a great white 
throne set in some mystic valley of Jehoshaphat, 
where some day the world is to be judged. We 
do not so get hold of Christ. The Christ who is 
in the past is not our Christ unless His power 
holds forth, the power of His spirit, which is the 
whole knowledge of the life in which we live. 
W T e think of the Christ of the future, for whom 
all the world is waiting. He will never enter 
into us and lead us unless we know that He is 
here and now. It does seem to me sometimes 
that if men would only take religion as a real 
and present thing, and if, instead of worship- 
ping it in the past and expecting it with fear 
and dread and vain hope in the future, it could 



THE CHRIST. 1 33 

be a real thing with them here and now, some- 
thing in which they are to live, not to which 
they are to flee in moments of doubt, not of 
which they should make rescue, but in which 
they should do all their work and live, then re- 
ligion would be to the soul of man so that it could 
not be cast aside, so that they must enter into 
it and take it into themselves and make it their 
own. Religion is not the simple fire-escape that 
you build, in anticipation of a possible danger, 
upon the outside of your dwelling and leave 
there until danger comes. You go to it some 
morning when a fire breaks out in your house, 
and the poor old thing that you built up there, and 
thought you could use some day, is so rusty 
and broken, and the weather has so beaten upon 
it, and the sun so turned its hinges, that it will 
not work. That is the condition of a man who 
has built himself what seems to be a creed of 
faith, a trust in God in anticipation of the day 
when danger is to overtake him, and has said to 
himself, I am safe, for I will take refuge in it 
then. But religion is the house in which we live, 
it is the table at which we sit, it is the fireside 
to which we draw near, the room that arches its 
graceful and familiar presence over us ; it is the 
bed on which we lie and think of the past and 
anticipate the future and gather our refresh- 
m int. There is no Christ except the present 



1 34 ADDRESSES. 

Christ for every man, unto whom all the power 
of the historic Christ is always appearing, and 
who is great with all the sweet solemnity that 
comes from the knowledge of what in the future 
He is to be to the world and to the soul. I am 
anxious to-day to impress this upon you : that 
the Christian faith is not a dogma, it is not 
primarily a law, but is a personal presence and 
an immediate life that is right here and now. 
I am anxious to have you know that to be a 
Christian does not mean primarily to believe 
this or that. It does not mean primarily, al- 
though it means necessarily afterward, to do this 
or that. But it means to know the presence of 
a true personal Christ among us and to follow. 
Here is the only true power by which a religion 
can become perpetual. Men outgrow many 
dogmas which they hold. The lines in which 
they try to live change their application to their 
lives. But I know a person with a deep, true 
life ; I enter into a friendship with one who is 
worthy I should be his friend, and he is mine 
always. What is the meaning of this sort of 
talk that we hear about a faith that they held 
once, but they have outgrown? What is the 
reason of this expectation that seems to have 
spread itself abroad, of necessity that the boy 
who had a religion should lose his religion some 
time or other, and that by and by he should take 



THE CHRIST. 1 35 

up a man's religion somewhere upon the other 
side of the gulf of infidelity and godlessness, 
through which he has passed in the mean while? 
You expect your boy of ten years old to be re- 
ligious with a child's sweet, trusting faith ; and 
you hope that your man of forty and fifty, beaten 
by the world, is to have found a God who can be 
his salvation. But the years between? What do 
you think of your young men of fifteen, twenty, 
twenty-five, and thirty years old? To have 
outgrown the boy's faith, and not to have come 
to the man's faith ? That seems almost to be an 
awful fate and destiny which you expect for 
them. But if our faith be this, then there shall 
be no need, no chance that a man shall outgrow 
it. Know Christ with the first conceptions, im- 
perfect and crude, of his boy's life, and he shall 
go on knowing more and more of that Christ. 
That friend, the Christ he knows at twenty-five, 
shall be different from the Christ he knew at 
ten, just exactly as the friend I know at fifty is 
different from the friend I knew at thirty, twenty 
years ago ; and yet He is the same friend still, 
forever opening the richness of an ever richer 
life, filling it with new experiences, with new 
manifestations of Himself. Let him drop some- 
thing which seemed to him to be a part of the 
religion, but was only a temporary phase or 
condition of it, going forward with the soul all 



13^ ADDRESSES. 

through the opening stages of life, and at last 
going forward with the soul into the life where 
it shall see as all along it has been seen, and 
know as it has been known. The old legend was 
that the clothes of the Israelites, which the Bible 
said waxed not old upon them in the desert dur- 
ing those forty years, not merely waxed not old 
those forty years, but grew with their growth, so 
that the little Hebrew who crossed the Red Sea 
in his boy's clothes wore the same clothes when 
he entered into the Promised Land. It is the 
parable of that which comes to the man who has 
a true Christian faith, a faith which comes in 
the personal friendship of Christ, a faith which 
comes not in the belief of certain things about 
Him, not in the doing slavishly of certain things 
which it seemed as if it had been said by Him 
that we must do, but in the personal entrance 
into His nature in a life for Him, in which He 
is able to send His life down into us. 

Then there is another thing that people are 
always thinking, that I hear very often from 
men, and that I have no doubt that I should hear 
from many of you, one by one. You talk about 
your earlier religion as if it had been some sort 
of a bondage from which you had escaped. How 
common it is to hear men, especially in this 
region, say : " I would be, perhaps, religious, ex- 
cept that there was so much religion forced upon 



THE CHRIST. 1 37 

me in my earliest days. I was driven to church 
when I was a boy, in those old Puritan days. 
I went to school, where they forced prayers upon 
me all the time. I was made to be religious, so 
now I cannot be religious. 1 ' Was there ever a 
more dreadful thing than for a soul to say that, 
because, it may be, of the unwisdom, or the 
imprudence, the overzeal and the mistaken zeal 
of other men, we have not got the full blessing 
of that rich, open, free life with Christ which 
the youth may have, and therefore we will aban- 
don the privileges of our higher life which is 
given to us in our manlier years? It all comes 
of this awful way of talking as if religion were 
the duty and not the inestimable privilege of 
human kind. The Christ stands before us and 
says, "Come to me." You say, "Must I?" 
And He answers, " You may." He will not even 
say, " You must." You may. And duty loses 
itself in privilege, and the soul enters into inde- 
pendence and escapes from its sins, fulfils its 
life, lays hold of its salvation, becomes eternal, 
begins to live an eternal life in the accepted and 
loving service of Christ. 

Now just one word, my friends. If this be so, 
whether you to-day are ready to make Christ 
your master and your friend or not, do not, I 
beg you, let yourself say that it is a silly or 
unreasonable belief, thus to know of a spiritual 



138 ADDRESSES. 

presence which is here among us, in which God 
is really in humanity. Do not let yourselves 
say, my friends, that the man who gives himself 
to Jesus Christ and earnestly tries to enter in 
deeper and deeper into his life and tries to do 
his will, that he may know the Christ and know 
himself in the Christ more and more — dare not 
call that brother a fool, as you have sometimes 
called your Christian man who watched scrupu- 
lously over his life and prayed, yes, prayed, the 
thing you think perhaps the foolishest thing that 
man can do, the thing that is the most reasonable 
act that any man does upon God's earth. If 
man is man and God is God, to live without 
prayer is not merely an awful thing: it is an 
infinitely foolish thing. When a man for the 
first time bows down upon his knees and prays, 
" Oh ! Christ, come unto me, reveal Thyself to 
me, make me to know Thee, that I may receive 
Thee, make me to be obedient that I may take 
Thee into my life," then that man has claimed 
his manhood. I beg you, I implore you, I adjure 
you that, if you be not ready to be Christian, 
you at least will know that the Christian life is 
the only true human life, and that the man who 
becomes thoroughly a Christian sets his face 
toward the fulfilment of his humanity, and so 
for the first time truly is a man. "As many 
as received Him,' 1 — so the great Scripture word 



THE CHRIST. 1 39 

runs of this Christ of whom we have been talk- 
ing, — "As many as received Him, to them gave 
He power to become the sons of God. 1 ' 

Just think of it! — the sons of God! The 
power to become that to as many as will receive 
the present Christ. 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 1 



" He chose David also His servant, and took him away 
from the sheepfolds ; that he might feed Jacob His people, 
and Israel His inheritance. So he fed them with a faith- 
ful and true heart, and ruled them prudently with all his 
power." — Psalm lxxviii. 71, 72, jt,. 

While I speak to you to-day, the body of the 
President who ruled this people, is lying, hon- 
ored and loved, in our city. It is impossible 
with that sacred presence in our midst for me to 
stand and speak of ordinary topics which oc- 
cupy the pulpit. I must speak of him to-day; 
and I therefore undertake to do what I had 
intended to do at some future time, to invite 
vou to study with me the character of Abraham 
Lincoln, the impulses of his life and the causes 
of his death. I know how hard it is to do it 
rightly, how impossible it is to do it worthily. 

1 A sermon preached in Philadelphia, while the body of the 
President was lying in the city. 

140 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 141 

But I shall speak with confidence, because I 
speak to those who love him, and whose ready 
love will fill out the deficiencies in a picture 
which my words will weakly try to draw. 

We take it for granted, first of all, that there 
is an essential connection between Mr. Lincoln's 
character and his violent and bloody death. It 
is no accident, no arbitrary decree of Providence. 
He lived as he did, and he died as he did, be- 
cause he was what he was. The more we see of 
events, the less we come to believe in any fate 
or destiny except the destiny of character. It 
will be our duty, then, to see what there was in 
the character of our great President that created 
the history of his life, and at last produced the 
catastrophe of his cruel death. After the first 
trembling horror, the first outburst of indignant 
sorrow, has grown calm, these are the questions 
which we are bound to ask and answer. 

It is not necessary for me even to sketch the 
biography of Mr. Lincoln. He was born in 
Kentucky fifty-six years ago, when Kentucky 
was a pioneer State. He lived, as boy and man, 
the hard and needy life of a backwoodsman, 
a farmer, a river boatman, and, finally, by his 
own efforts at self-education, of an active, re- 
spected, influential citizen, in the half-organized 
and manifold interests of a new and energetic 
community. From his boyhood up he lived in 



1 42 ADDRESSES. 

direct and vigorous contact with men and things, 
not as in older States and easier conditions with 
words and theories ; and both his moral convic- 
tions and his intellectual opinions gathered from 
that contact a supreme degree of that character 
by which men knew him, that character which 
is the most distinctive possession of the best 
American nature, that almost indescribable 
quality which we call in general clearness or 
truth, and which appears in the physical struc- 
ture as health, in the moral constitution as hon- 
esty, in the mental structure as sagacity, and in 
the region of active life as practicalness. This 
one character, with many sides, all shaped by 
the same essential force and testifying to the 
same inner influences, was what was powerful 
in him and decreed for him the life he was to 
live and the death he was to die. We must 
take no smaller view than this of what he was. 
Even his physical conditions are not to be for- 
gotten in making up his character. We make 
too little always of the physical; certainly we 
make too little of it here if we lose out of sight 
the strength and muscular activity, the power 
of doing and enduring, which the backwoods- 
boy inherited from generations of hard-living 
ancestors, and appropriated for his own by a 
long discipline of bodily toil. He brought to 
the solution of the question of labor in this coun- 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 1 43 

try not merely a mind, but a body thoroughly in 
sympathy with labor, full of the culture of labor, 
bearing witness to the dignity and excellence of 
work in every muscle that work had toughened 
and every sense that work had made clear and 
true. He could not have brought the mind for 
his task so perfectly, unless he had first brought 
the body whose rugged and stubborn health was 
always contradicting to him the false theories 
of labor, and always asserting the true. 

As to the moral and mental powers which dis- 
tinguished him, all embraceable under this gen- 
eral description of clearness of truth, the most 
remarkable thing is the way in which they blend 
with one another, so that it is next to impos- 
sible to examine them in separation. A great 
many people have discussed very crudely 
whether Abraham Lincoln was an intellectual 
man or not ; as if intellect were a thing always 
of the same sort, which you could precipitate 
from the other constituents of a man's nature 
and weigh by itself, and compare by pounds 
and ounces in this man with another. The fact 
is, that in all the simplest characters that line 
between the mental and moral natures is always 
vague and indistinct. They run together, and 
in their best combinations you are unable to dis- 
criminate, in the wisdom which is their result, 
how much is moral and how much is intellec- 



144 ADDRESSES. 

tual. You are unable to tell whether in the wise 
acts and words which issue from such a life 
there is more of the righteousness that comes of 
a clear conscience, or of the sagacity that comes 
of a clear brain. In more complex characters 
and under more complex conditions, the moral 
and the mental lives come to be less healthily 
combined. They co-operate, they help each 
other less. They come even to stand over 
against each other as antagonists ; till we have 
that vague but most melancholy notion which 
pervades the life of all elaborate civilization, 
that goodness and greatness, as we call them, 
are not to be looked for together, till we expect 
to see and so do see a feeble and narrow con- 
scientiousness on the one hand, and a bad, un- 
principled intelligence on the other, dividing 
the suffrages of men. 

It is the great boon of such characters as Mr. 
Lincoln's, that they reunite what God has joined 
together and man has put asunder. In him was 
vindicated the greatness of real goodness and the 
goodness of real greatness. The twain were 
one flesh. Not one of all the multitudes who 
stood and looked up to him for direction with 
such a loving and implicit trust can tell you 
to-day whether the wise judgments that he gave 
came most from a strong head or a sound heart. 
If you ask them, they are puzzled. There are 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 1 45 

men as good as he, but they do bad things. 
There are men as intelligent as he, but they do 
foolish things. In him goodness and intelli- 
gence combined and made their best result of 
wisdom. For perfect truth consists not merely 
in the right constituents of character, but in 
their right and intimate conjunction. This 
union of the mental and moral into a life of ad- 
mirable simplicity is what we most admire in 
children ; but in them it is unsettled and unprac- 
tical. But when it is preserved into manhood, 
deepened into reliability and maturity, it is that 
glorified childlikeness, that high and reverend 
simplicity, which shames and baffles the most 
accomplished astuteness, and is chosen by God 
to fill his purposes when he needs a ruler for 
his people, of faithful and true heart, such as he 
had who was our President. 

Another evident quality of such a character 
as this will be its freshness or newness ; if we 
may so speak. Its freshness or readiness — call 
it what you will — its ability to take up new 
duties and do them in a new way, will result of 
necessity from its truth and clearness. The 
simple natures and forces will always be the 
most pliant ones. Water bends and shapes it- 
self to any channel. Air folds and adapts itsell 
to each new figure. They are the simplest and 
the most infinitely active things in nature. So 



146 ADDRESSES. 

this nature, in very virtue of its simplicity, must 
be also free, always fitting itself to each new 
need. It will always start from the most funda- 
mental and eternal conditions, and work in the 
straightest even although they be the newest 
ways, to the present prescribed purpose. In 
one word, it must be broad and independent and 
radical. So that freedom and radicalness in the 
character of Abraham Lincoln were not separate 
qualities, but the necessary results of his sim- 
plicity and childlikeness and truth. 

Here then we have some conception of the 
man. Out of this character came the life which 
we admire and the death which we lament to- 
day. He was called in that character to that 
life and death. It was just the nature, as you 
see, which a new nation such as ours ought to 
produce. All the conditions of his birth, his 
youth, his manhood, which made him what he 
was, were not irregular and exceptional, but 
were the normal conditions of a new and simple 
country. His pioneer home in Indiana was a 
type of the pioneer land in which he lived. If 
ever there was a man who was a part of the 
time and country he lived in, this was he. The 
same simple respect for labor won in the school 
of work and incorporated into blood and muscle ; 
the same unassuming loyalty to the simple vir- 
tues of temperance and industry and integrity ; 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 1 47 

the same sagacious judgment which had learned 
to be quick-eyed and quick-brained in the con- 
stant presence of emergency ; the same direct 
and clear thought about things, social, political, 
and religious, that was in him supremely, was 
in the people he was sent to rule. Surely, with 
such a type-man for ruler, there would seem to 
be but a smooth and even road over which he 
might lead the people whose character he repre- 
sented into the new region of national happiness 
and comfort and usefulness, for which that char- 
acter had been designed. 

But then we come to the beginning of all trou- 
ble. Abraham Lincoln was the type-man of the 
country, but not of the whole country. This 
character which we have been trying to describe 
was the character of an American under the 
discipline of freedom. There was another 
American character which had been developed 
under the influence of slavery. There was no 
one American character embracing the land. 
There were two characters, with impulses of 
irrepressible and deadly conflict. This citizen 
whom we have been honoring and praising rep- 
resented one. The whole great scheme with 
which he was ultimately brought in conflict, and 
which has finally killed him, represented the 
other. Beside this nature, true and fresh and 
new, there was another nature, false and effete 



148 ADDRESSES. 

and old. The one nature found itself in a new 
world, and set itself to discover the new ways 
for the new duties that were given it. The 
other nature, full of the false pride of blood, 
set itself to reproduce in a new world the insti- 
tutions and the spirit of the old, to build anew 
the structure of the feudalism which had been 
corrupt in its own day, and which had been left 
far behind by the advancing conscience and 
needs of the progressing race. The one nature 
magnified labor, the other nature depreciated 
and despised it. The one honored the laborer, 
and the other scorned him. The one was sim- 
ple and direct ; the other, complex, full of soph- 
istries and self-excuses. The one was free to 
look all that claimed to be truth in the face, 
and separate the error from the truth that might 
be in it ; the other did not dare to investigate, 
because its own established prides and systems 
were dearer to it than the truth itself, and so 
even truth went about in it doing the work of 
error. The one was ready to state broad prin- 
ciples, of the brotherhood of man, the universal 
fatherhood and justice of God, however imper- 
fectly it might realize them in practice; the 
other denied even the principles, and so dug 
deep and laid below its special sins the broad 
foundation of a consistent, acknowledged sin- 
fulness. In a word, one nature was full of the 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 1 49 

influences of Freedom, the other nature was full 
of the influences of Slavery. 

In general, these two regions of our national 
life were separated by a geographical boundary. 
One was the spirit of the North, the other was 
the spirit of the South. But the Southern nature 
was by no means all a Southern thing. There 
it had an organized, established form, a certain 
definite, established institution about which it 
clustered. Here, lacking advantage, it lived in 
less expressive ways and so lived more weakly. 
There, there was the horrible sacrament of sla- 
very, the outward and visible sign round which 
the inward and spiritual temper gathered and 
kept itself alive. But who doubts that among 
us the spirit of slavery lived and thrived ? Its 
formal existence had been swept away from one 
State after another, partly on conscientious, 
partly on economical grounds, but its spirit was 
here, in every sympathy that Northern winds 
carried to the listening ear of the Southern slave- 
holder, and in every oppression of the weak by 
the strong, every proud assumption of idleness 
over labor which echoed the music of South- 
ern life back to us. Here in our midst lived 
that worse and falser nature, side by side 
with the true and better nature which God 
meant should be the nature of Americans, 
and of which he was shaping out the type 



1 50 ADDRESSES. 

and champion in his chosen David of the 
sheepfold. 

Here then we have the two. The history ot 
our country for many years is the history of how 
these two elements of American life approached 
collision. They wrought their separate reac- 
tions on each other. Men debate and quarrel 
even now about the rise of Northern Abolition- 
ism, about whether the Northern Abolitionists 
were right or wrong, whether they did harm or 
good. How vain the quarrel is ! It was inevi- 
table. It was inevitable in the nature of things 
that two such natures living here together should 
be set violently against each other. It is inevi- 
table, till man be far more unfeeling and untrue 
to his convictions than he has always been, that 
a great wrong asserting itself vehemently should 
arouse to no less vehement assertion the oppos- 
ing right. The only wonder is that there was 
not more of it. The only wonder is that so few 
were swept away to take by an impulse they 
could not resist their stand of hatred to the 
wicked institution. The only wonder is, that 
only one brave, reckless man came forth to cast 
himself, almost single-handed, with a hopeless 
hope, against the proud power that he hated, 
and trust to the influence of a soul marching on 
into the history of his countrymen to stir them 
to a vindication of the truth he loved. At any 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. I 5 I 

rate, whether the Abolitionists were wrong or 
right, there grew up about their violence, as 
there always will about the extremism of ex- 
treme reformers, a great mass of feeling, catch- 
ing their spirit and asserting it firmly, though 
in more moderate degrees and methods. About 
the nucleus of Abolitionism grew up a great 
American Anti-Slavery determination, which 
at last gathered strength enough to take its 
stand to insist upon the checking and limiting 
the extension of the power of slavery, and to 
put the type-man, whom God had been prepar- 
ing for the task, before the world, to do the 
work on which it had resolved. Then came 
discontent, secession, treason. The two Amer- 
ican natures, long advancing to encounter, met 
at last, and a whole country, yet trembling with 
the shock, bears witness how terrible the meet- 
ing was. 

Thus I have tried briefly to trace out the 
gradual course by which God brought the char- 
acter which He designed to be the controlling 
character of this new world into distinct collis- 
ion with the hostile character which it was to 
destroy and absorb, and set it in the person of 
its type-man in the seat of highest power. The 
character formed under the discipline of Free- 
dom and the character formed under the disci- 
pline of Slavery developed all their difference 



152 ADDRESSES. 

and met in hostile conflict when this war began. 
Notice, it was not only in what he did and was 
towards the slave, it was in all he did and was 
everywhere that we accept Mr. Lincoln's char- 
acter as the true result of our free life and in- 
stitutions. Nowhere else could have come forth 
that genuine love of the people, which in him 
no one could suspect of being either the cheap 
flattery of the demagogue or the abstract philan- 
thropy of the philosopher, which made our 
President, while he lived, the centre of a great 
household land, and when he died so cruelly, 
made every humblest household thrill with a 
sense of personal bereavement which the death 
of rulers is not apt to bring. Nowhere else than 
out of the life of freedom could have come that 
personal unselfishness and generosity which 
made so gracious a part of this good man's 
character. How, many soldiers feel yet the 
pressure of a strong hand that clasped theirs 
once as they lay sick and weak in the dreary 
hospital! How many ears will never lose the 
thrill of some kind word he spoke — he who 
could speak so kindly to promise a kindness 
that always matched his word ! How often he 
surprised the land with a clemency which made 
even those who questioned his policy love him 
the more for what they called his weakness, — 
seeing how the man in whom God had most 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. I 53 

embodied the discipline of Freedom not only 
could not be a slave, but could not be a tyrant ! 
In the heartiness of his mirth and his enjoyment 
of simple joys ; in the directness and shrewd- 
ness of perception which constituted his wit ; in 
the untired, undiscouraged faith in human na- 
ture which he always kept ; and perhaps above 
all in the plainness and quiet, unostentatious 
earnestness and independence of his religious 
life, in his humble love and trust ot God — in 
all, it was a character such as only Freedom 
knows how to make. 

Now it was in this character, rather than in 
any mere political position, that the fitness of 
Mr. Lincoln to stand forth in the struggle of 
the two American natures really lay. We are 
told that he did not come to the Presidential 
chair pledged to the abolition of Slavery. When 
will we learn that with all true men it is not 
what they intend to do, but it is what the quali- 
ties of their natures bind them to do, that deter- 
mines their career ! The President came to his 
power full of the blood, strong in the strength 
of Freedom. He came there free, and hating 
slavery. He came there, leaving on record 
words like these spoken three years before and 
never contradicted. He had said, " A house 
divided against itself cannot stand. I believe 
this Government cannot endure permanently, 



1 54 ADDRESSES. 

half slave and half free. I do not expect the 
Union to be dissolved ; I do not expect the 
house to fall ; but I expect it will cease to be 
divided. It will become all one thing or all the 
other." When the question came, he knew 
which thing he meant that it should be. His 
whole nature settled that question for him. 
Such a man must always live as he used to say 
he lived (and was blamed for saying it) " con- 
trolled by events, not controlling them." And 
with a reverent and clear mind, to be controlled 
by events means to be controlled by God. For 
such a man there was no hesitation when God 
brought him up face to face with Slavery and 
put the sword into his hand and said, " Strike 
it down dead." He was a willing servant then. 
If ever the face of a man writing solemn words 
glowed with a solemn joy, it must have been the 
face of Abraham Lincoln, as he bent over the 
page where the Emancipation Proclamation of 
1863 was growing into shape, and giving man- 
hood and freedom as he wrote it to hundreds of 
thousands of his fellow-men. Here was a work 
in which his whole nature could rejoice. Here 
was an act that crowned the whole culture of his 
life. All the past, the free boyhood in the 
woods, the free youth upon the farm, the free 
manhood in the honorable citizen's employ- 
ments — all his freedom gathered and completed 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. I 55 

itself in this. And as the swarthy multitudes 
came in, ragged, and tired, and hungry, and 
ignorant, but free forever from anything but 
the memorial scars of the fetters and the whip, 
singing rude songs in which the new triumph of 
freedom struggled and heaved below the sad 
melody that had been shaped for bondage ; as 
in their camps and hovels there grew up to their 
half-superstitious eyes the image of a great 
Father almost more than man, to whom they 
owed their freedom, — were they not half right? 
For it was not to one man, driven by stress of 
policy, or swept off by a whim of pity, that the 
noble act was due. It was to the American 
nature, long kept by God in his own intentions 
till his time should come, at last emerging into 
sight and power, and bound up and embodied in 
this best and most American of all Americans, 
to whom we and those poor frightened slaves at 
last might look up together and love to call him, 
with one voice, our Father. 

Thus, we have seen something of what the 
character of Mr. Lincoln was, and how it issued 
in the life he lived. It remains for us to see 
how it resulted also in the terrible death which 
has laid his murdered body here in our town 
among lamenting multitudes to-day. It is not 
a hard question, though it is sad to answer. We 
saw the two natures, the nature of Slavery and 



156 ADDRESSES. 

the nature of Freedom, at last set against each 
other, come at last to open war. Both fought, 
fought long, fought bravely; but each, as was 
perfectly natural, fought with the tools and in 
the ways which its own character had made 
familiar to it. The character of Slavery was 
brutal, barbarous, and treacherous ; and so the 
whole history of the slave power during the war 
has been full of ways of warfare brutal, barba- 
rous, and treacherous, beyond anything that men 
bred in freedom could have been driven to by 
the most hateful passions. It is not to be mar- 
velled at. It is not to be set down as the special 
sin of the war. It goes back beyond that. It 
is the sin of the system. It is the barbarism of 
Slavery. When Slavery went to war to save its 
life, what wonder if its barbarism grew barba- 
rous a hundred-fold ! 

One would he attempting a task which once 
was almost hopeless, but which now is only 
needless, if he set himself to convince a North- 
ern congregation that Slavery was a barbarian 
institution. It would be hardly more necessary 
to try to prove how its barbarism has shown 
itself during this war. The same spirit which 
was blind to the wickedness of breaking sacred 
ties, of separating man and wife, of beating 
women till they dropped down dead, of organiz- 
ing licentiousness and sin into commercial sys- 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. I 57 

terns, of forbidding knowledge and protecting 
itself with ignorance, of putting on its arms and 
riding out to steal a State at the beleaguered 
ballot-box away from freedom — in one word 
(for its simplest definition is its worst dishonor), 
the spirit that gave man the ownership in man 
in time of peace, has found out yet more terri- 
ble barbarisms for the time of war. It has 
hewed and burned the bodies of the dead. It 
has starved and mutilated its helpless prisoners. 
It has dealt by truth, not as men will in a time 
of excitement, lightly and with frequent viola- 
tions, but with a cool, and deliberate, and sys- 
tematic contempt. It has sent its agents into 
Northern towns to fire peaceful hotels where 
hundreds of peaceful men and women slept. It 
has undermined the prisons where its victims 
starved, and made all ready to blow with one 
blast their wretched life away. It has delighted 
in the lowest and basest scurrility even on the 
highest and most honorable lips. It has cor- 
rupted the graciousness of women and killed 
out the truth of men. 

I do not count up the terrible catalogue be- 
cause I like to, nor because I wish to stir your 
hearts to passion. Even now, you and I have 
no right to indulge in personal hatred to the 
men who did these things. But we are not 
doing right by ourselves, by the President that 



158 ADDRESSES. 

we have lost, or by God who had a purpose in 
our losing him, unless we know thoroughly that 
it was this same spirit which we have seen to 
be a tyrant in peace and a savage in war, that 
has crowned itself with the working of this final 
woe. It was the conflict of the two American 
natures, the false and the true. It was Slavery 
and Freedom that met in their two representa- 
tives, the assassin and the President ; and the 
victim of the last desperate struggle of the dying 
Slavery lies dead to-day in Independence Hall. 

Solemnly, in the sight of God, I charge this 
murder where it belongs, on Slavery. I dare 
not stand here in His sight, and before Him or 
you speak doubtful and double-meaning words 
of vague repentance, as if we had killed our 
President. We have sins enough, but we have 
not done this sin, save as by weak concessions 
and timid compromises we have let the spirit of 
Slavery grow strong and ripe for such a deed. 
In the barbarism of Slavery the foul act and its 
foul method had their birth. By all the good- 
ness that there was in him ; by all the love we 
had for him (and who shall tell how great it 
was) ; by all the sorrow that has burdened down 
this desolate and dreadful week, — I charge this 
murder where it belongs, on Slavery. I bid 
you to remember where the charge belongs, to 
write it on the door-posts of your mourning 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. I 59 

houses, to teach it to your wondering children, 
to give it to the history of these times, that all 
times to come may hate and dread the sin that 
killed our noblest President. 

If ever anything were clear, this is the clear- 
est. Is there the man alive who thinks that 
Abraham Lincoln was shot just for himself; 
that it was that one man for whom the plot was 
laid? The gentlest, kindest, most indulgent 
man that ever ruled a State ! The man who knew 
not how to speak a word of harshness or how to 
make a foe ! Was it he for whom the murderer 
lurked with a mere private hate? It was not 
he, but what he stood for. It was Law and Lib- 
erty, it was Government and Freedom, against 
which the hate gathered and the treacherous 
shot was fired. And I know not how the crime 
of him who shoots at Law and Liberty in the 
crowded glare of a great theatre differs from 
theirs who have levelled their aim at the same 
great beings from behind a thousand ambuscades 
and on a hundred battle-fields of this long war. 
Every general in the field, and every false citi- 
zen in our midst at home, who has plotted and 
labored to destroy the lives of the soldiers of the 
Republic, is brother to him who did this deed. 
The American nature, the American truths, of 
which our President was the anointed and su- 
preme embodiment, have been embodied in mul- 



l60 ADDRESSES. 

titudes of heroes who marched unknown and fell 
unnoticed in our ranks. For them, just as for 
him, character decreed a life and a death. The 
blood of all of them I charge on the same head. 
Slavery armed with Treason was their murderer. 
Men point out to us the absurdity and folly of 
this awful crime. Again and again we hear men 
say, " It was the worst thing for themselves they 
could have done. They have shot a representa- 
tive man, and the cause he represented grows 
stronger and sterner by his death. Can it be 
that so wise a devil was so foolish here? Must 
it not have been the act of one poor madman, 
born and nursed in his own reckless brain? 11 
My friends, let us understand this matter. It 
was a foolish act. Its folly was only equalled 
by its wickedness. It was a foolish act. But 
when did sin begin to be wise? When did 
wickedness learn wisdom? When did the fool 
stop saving in his heart, "There is no God, 11 
and acting godlessly in the absurdity of his im- 
piety? The cause that Abraham Lincoln died 
for shall grow stronger by his death, — stronger 
and sterner. Stronger to set its pillars deep into 
the structure of our nation's life ; sterner to ex- 
ecute the justice of the Lord upon his enemies. 
Stronger to spread its arms and grasp our whole 
land into freedom ; sterner to sweep the last 
poor -host of Slavery out of our haunted homes. 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. l6l 

But while we feel the folly of this act, let not its 
folly hide its wickedness. It was the wickedness 
of Slavery putting on a foolishness for which its 
wickedness and that alone is responsible, that 
robbed the nation of a President and the peo- 
ple of a father. And remember this, that the 
folly of the Slave power in striking the represen- 
tative of Freedom, and thinking that thereby it 
killed Freedom itself, is only a folly that we shall 
echo if we dare to think that in punishing the 
representatives of Slavery who did this deed, 
we are putting Slavery to death. Dispersing 
armies and hanging traitors, imperatively as jus- 
tice and necessity may demand them both, are 
not killing the spirit out of which they sprang. 
The traitor must die because he has committed 
treason. The murderer must die because he has 
committed murder. Slavery must die, because 
out of it, and it alone, came forth the treason of 
the traitor and the murder of the murderer. Do 
not say that it is dead. It is not, while its es- 
sential spirit lives. While one man counts 
another man his born inferior for the color of his 
skin, while both in North and South prejudices 
and practices, which the law cannot touch, but 
which God hates, keep alive in our people's 
hearts the spirit of the old iniquity, it is not 
dead. The new American nature must supplant 
the old. We must grow like our President, in 



1 62 ADDRESSES. 

his truth, his independence, his religion, and his 
wide humanity. Then the character by which 
he died shall be in us, and by it we shall live. 
Then peace shall come that knows no war, and 
law that knows no treason ; and full of his spirit 
a grateful land shall gather round his grave, and 
in the daily psalm of prosperous and righteous 
living, thank God forever for his life and death. 
So let him lie here in our midst to-day, and 
let our people go and bend with solemn thought- 
fulness and look upon his face and read the les- 
sons of his burial. As he paused here on his 
journey from the Western home and told us what 
by the help of God he meant to do, so let him 
pause upon his way back to his Western grave 
and tell us with a silence more eloquent than 
words how bravely, how truly, by the strength 
of God, he did it. God brought him up as he 
brought David up from the sheepfolds to feed 
Jacob, his people, and Israel, his inheritance. 
He came up in earnestness and faith, and he 
goes back in triumph. As he pauses here to- 
day, and from his cold lips bids us bear witness 
how he has met the duty that was laid on him, 
what can we say out of our full hearts but this 
— "He fed them with a faithful and true heart, 
and ruled them prudently with all his power. 1 ' 
The Shepherd of the People! that old name that 
the best rulers ever craved. What ruler ever 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 1 63 

won it like this dead President of ours ? He fed 
us faithfully and truly. He fed us with coun- 
sel when we were in doubt, with inspiration 
when we sometimes faltered, with caution when 
we would be rash, with calm, clear, trustful 
cheerfulness through many an hour when our 
hearts were dark. He fed hungry souls all 
over the country with sympathy and consolation. 
He spread before the whole land feasts of great 
duty and devotion and patriotism, on which the 
land grew strong. He fed us with solemn, solid 
truths. He taught us the sacredness of govern- 
ment, the wickedness of treason. He made our 
souls glad and vigorous with the love of liberty 
that was in his. He showed us how to love 
truth and yet be charitable — how to hate wrong 
and all oppression, and yet not treasure one 
personal injury or insult. He fed all his people, 
from the highest to the lowest, from the most 
privileged down to the most enslaved. Best of 
all, he fed us with a reverent and genuine reli- 
gion. He spread before us the love and fear of 
God just in that shape in which we need them 
most, and out of his faithful service of a higher 
Master who of us has not taken and eaten and 
grown strong? " He fed them with a faithful 
and true heart. 1 ' Yes, till the last. For at the 
last, behold him standing with hand reached out 
to feed the South with mercy and the North with 



164 ADDRESSES. 

charity, and the whole land with peace, when 
the Lord who had sent him called him and his 
work was done ! 

He stood once on the battle-field of our own 
State, and said of the brave men who had saved 
it words as noble as any countryman of ours 
ever spoke. Let us stand in the country he has 
saved, and which is to be his grave and monu- 
ment, and say of Abraham Lincoln what he said 
of the soldiers who had died at Gettys- 
burg. He stood there with their graves 
before him, and these are the words he 
said : — 



" We cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we 
cannot hallow this ground. The brave men who strug- 
gled here have consecrated it far beyond our power 
to add or detract. The world will little note nor long 
remember what we say here, but it can never forget 
what they did here. It is for us the living rather to 
be dedicated to the unfinished work which they who 
fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is 
rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task 
remaining before us, that from these honored dead 
we take increased devotion to that cause for which 
they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we 
here highly resolve that these dead shall not have 
died in vain; and this nation, under God, shall have 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. l6$ 

a new birth of freedom, and that government of the 
people, by the people, and for the people shall not 
perish from the earth." 

May God make us worthy of the memory of 
Abraham Lincoln! 



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